Following efforts for regulation of child labor, establishment of the living wage, and reduction of the working day, progressive organizations of all types are giving an increasingly prominent place on their programs to legislation for universal workmen's health insurance. PLAY GROUNDS INTRODUCTORY NOTE Hardly had America struck her stride in the Great War, when the war stopped. Unprepared as we had been for hostilities, still less ready were we for peace; for while many feared in advance that America would be drawn into the holocaust, few dared hope-in a fourth year of unprecedented destruction-for the sudden victorious cessation of military activity. Armed effort for the protection of civilization is over, it may be, for all time. There remains, however, the never-ending peaceful struggle toward higher ideals of life and labor-toward what President Wilson has called "a new day—a day, we hope and believe, of greater opportunity and greater prosperity for the average mass of struggling men and women, and of greater safety and opportunity for children.' The war has taught us many things, among them that it is not efficient for a nation to overwork or underpay its wage-earners, to tolerate preventable accident and disease, to squander labor power through unemployment. The mind as well as the heart of the country has been stirred by the crisis we have just passed through, and there is on many sides a disposition to see that the hard and wasteful conditions of the past shall not again obtain. Not a return to the old, but progress to the new, is the keynote of genuine Reconstruction. In the consciousness that its standards, built upon years of scientific investigation, have been a thousand times vindicated by the events of the past four years, the Association for Labor Legislation would feel that it were falling short of its ideals of patriotic service did it not again, while the new world is in forming, present some of the more fundamental of these ideals as Foundations for Reconstruction. The articles herewith printed, therefore, on a national employment service, on workmen's compensation and health insurance, on various phases of women's work (for up-to-the-minute informa |