to English students. The history of Germany as taught to the French is unrecognisable when read east of the Rhine. So it is with industry, the history of which is for the most part a serious travesty of the facts. The Industrial Revolution, actually the greatest civilizing movement of all time, is represented as a curse. The Middle Ages, the blackest period in the history of man, so far as anything in the way of material well-being is concerned, are depicted as something to desire. The libels on the early factories which are common to history are particularly cruel and full of danger. Mrs. Lilian Knowles did something to put the matter right, and Mr. Vaughan Wilkins in "Sidelights on Industrial Evolution " has done more; but apart from these two authors, hardly a voice has been raised to discredit the falsehoods. And yet a very short and simple statement can convey the truth. The Lancashire cotton trade found most of the money for the free trade campaign conducted by Cobden and Bright. The House of Lords, representing the landed interests which were damaged by the importation of foreign wheat, retaliated with the Factory Acts. The whole of the child-life of the nation was, at that time, treated in a way that is unthinkable to-day, and child-life in the factories was no worse than the ordinary child-life of the period. The conditions in the factories were admittedly much better than conditions in the home industries which they supplanted. Lord Shaftesbury was responsible for awakening the public conscience to the value of child-life, and he made use of the factory to effect his purpose much in the same way that Mr. Lloyd George made use of the dukes to promote interest in his People's Budget, and with about as much justice. I have purposely avoided in this article current or topical questions. It is in my judgment quite impossible that public discussion of day by day economic problems can be good or produce beneficial results until the public mind gets nearer to the truth on the underlying principles of economics and the real history of industry. A settlement of the coal question, for example, made by consent of three parties who are all either ignorant or wrong, can be nothing but a temporary truce preparatory to the next struggle. Coal owners who believe that private property is for private convenience; coal miners who pretend to think that work has a value apart from what the market any will pay for it; and a public which hugs the delusion that the government can do anything, are all totally unfitted to make arrangement which contains the least element of permanency or the remotest prospect of lasting satisfaction for anybody. So it seems to me we can only wait and hope for a better general understanding and acceptance of simple truth and fundamental principles. Work is a service to others. The buyer settles the price. An article is worth what it will fetch-no less and no more. Property, to whomever it belongs, serves the community, and since the individual is the only known agent able to conserve property, private ownership is essential to public good. Government can prevent evil but can do no positive good, and in particular is from its nature incapable of any form of material production. Until things like these are understood little hope of material progress offers itself to a suffering humanity. But these things accepted, and a return to individualism and activity thus assured, the general standard of living would move regularly upwards. ERNEST J. P. BENN FAMILY ENDOWMENT 1. The Disinherited Family: a Plea for the Endowment of the Family. By ELEANOR F. RATHBONE. Edward Arnold. 1924. 2. Pamphlets of the Family Endowment Society; 50, Romney Street, Westminster. 3. Family Income Insurance. By JOSEPH L. COHEN, M.A. P. S. King & Son. 4. Family Allowances. Geneva: International Labour Office. 5. Family Allowances in Practice. By H. H. R. VIBART, M.A. & Son. 1926. 1924. Recommendation by the Coal Commission.-The introduction of a family allowance system, either nationally or by districts, is desirable. Pooling schemes should be adopted to prevent married men with families being prejudiced in obtaining employment. Owners' Reply. This is mainly a question for the workmen. The owners do not express any view adverse to the principle of family allowances. The matter would have to be dealt with district by district as part of the subsistence wage arrangements. Miners' Reply. The miners are prepared to consider the question of family allowances, subject to a guaranteed weekly minimum wage being established, but hold that the funds necessary to provide such allowances should be raised by means of a properly graduated system of taxation. THE above extract from the miners' reply to the Report of the Coal Commission marks the attainment of a stage on which the Family Endowment Society, and particularly its vice-chairman and protagonist (Miss E. F. Rathbone), may well congratulate themselves; but it also forebodes a tough struggle before the plan comes into operation in this country. The Society's energetic propaganda has made the general idea it advocates familiar enough, but the issues involved are so far-reaching, socially and financially, as to demand closer examination. In detail the system presents a bewildering multiplicity of variants between which even the Society seems to hesitate, but the main principles may be briefly recapitulated. It seeks to improve on that rule of civilized communities since Adam delved and Eve span, by which a free man's power to support a family depends on the value of his labour as determined by economic law (and nowadays the power of trade organization). For this it would substitute (a) a wage independent of matrimonial circumstances, and (b) allowances on a fixed scale, according to the size of his family. On any such scheme, the miners' point arises at once: are the allowances to be found out of the resources of industry, or to be a supplement from outside sources? It is argued that not only coal, but industry generally, is unable to provide, for single and married men alike, a wage adequate to support even a small family at the standards of to-day, so that large numbers of children are below the poverty line, while bachelors draw more than they require, and a redistribution of the wages fund is urged-" to each according to his needs." The Coal Commission clearly intended such a redistribution, not of the present but of a reduced total, while the miners insisted that the allowances must be an addition to the total, found by taxation of the wealthy-a very pretty quarrel. The recommendation of "pooling schemes " relates to another obvious difficulty. If each employer pays his own men on the allowance plan, nobody will employ a family man if he can get a bachelor. To meet this, each employer pays into an equalisation fund ("pool") a quota depending not on the families of the individuals he employs, but on the average family per man for the whole industry or district covered by the pool, from which all families then draw. This ingenious contrivance originated in France as a feature of purely voluntary local associations among employers. It breaks down in the case of the employees of the municipal authority of a district, which might save the rates by employing bachelors preferentially; and taxpayers will applaud the ready wit which has solved this further difficulty by proposing that the allowances for all such employees should be borne by the Exchequer !* Between the miners' plan of State allowances and the French plan of employers' funds there are any number of possible compromises, of which one claims special attention. Its essence is to invoke the comforting name of Social Insurance, under cover of which the element of “9d. for 4d.," i.e., contribution by the taxpayer of a large share of the cost, slips quietly in, and no shock is felt at the suggestion that a fair division of the burden would be to place equal shares on employee, employer and State, the last imposition being defended on the ground that “the well-being of children concerns us all "—an argument for any form of extreme socialism. *" The Disinherited Family," p. 278. Whatever plan be chosen, the cost to the taxpayer depends on the share assigned to the State, the social strata covered by the scheme, the question of an allowance for the mother as well as the children, the scale of allowances, the age-limit for children and other details. With so many variables it is natural that estimates should vary widely. "The Disinherited Family " put the cost of a State scheme as high as £243,000,000 a year; but perhaps the most systematic attempt at estimating is that in Mr. Cohen's " Family Income Insurance," where he gives figures for twelve possible variations of a scheme covering the children of "employed contributors" already socially insured. The estimated total ranges from £184,000,000 for allowances to age 16 (of 8s. weekly for the first child, 6s. for the next three, and 4s. for others), down to £76,000,000 at a flat rate of 38. weekly to age 15. The corresponding weekly contribution rates for each employed contributor (adult male) are from 5s. 91d. to 2s. 6d., with half these rates for employed women and juveniles under 18 and it is suggested that workman, employer and State should each pay one-third. Cause is shown below for thinking that these figures do not reveal the whole cost; but they suffice to show that it is time for the taxpayer to sit up and take notice. The roots of the propaganda are two : feminism and post-war poverty. But the ground had been prepared for the seed by the war" separation allowances " for the families of the armed forces, and the rationing of food according to the number of mouths in the household. If under the system of earned wages industry cannot provide for each father, potential as well as actual, an income adequate for family needs, the claim of women also to wages on the men's scale is clearly hopeless. Lower wages for women are defensible so long as the man normally supports a family and the woman does not. The first objective in the feminist battle for "equal pay" was therefore the destruction of the wages system, and as early as 1918 a" Research Committee" of the National Union for Equal Citizenship propounded in "Equal Pay and the Family " a scheme for the national endowment of maternity and childhood. With one exception, the authors of this scheme are to be found to-day on the Council of the Family Endowment Society. Other feminist features are the stress laid on payment of the allowances (in respect of the father's employment) direct to the mother, some implications of |