are naturally opposed to monopolies either in the form of state insurance or employers' mutuals. They maintain that the best social results will be secured where the law provides for fair competition among state funds and employers' mutuals and themselves, by which they mean that the states shall not subsidize the state funds or the funds of the employers' mutuals out of general taxation, but shall establish scientifically determined non-competitive insurance rates. Under such conditions, they assert, that organization would prove its right to do the business which was most aggressive and efficient in preventing accidents. For by non-competitive, scientifically determined rates, they do not mean inflexible rates, but rates that may be modified not only in the light of the accident experience of a given employer, but also with reference to the safeguards against accidents which the employer adopts. With "fair competition," state-controlled non-competitive rates, including a definite schedule of "individual-merit rating," the only remaining field for competition would be "competition in service"; the organization best equipped to help the employer in reducing accidents would, under these conditions, be able to furnish insurance at the lowest rates, and would naturally secure the business.

In recognition of this fact, the leading companies, through their Compensation Service Bureau, have actually done more than the state funds or the mutuals in discovering what the true scientific rates are, and they have created an accident-prevention service which, while not superior to the best state services like those of Wisconsin and Massachusetts, is doing more for the reduction of accidents in the country at large than any other body-almost as much, it is fair to say, as all other organizations, exclusive of a few very large corporations, put together. "Objection may be raised," says the manager of this Service Bureau, "that this is commercializing safety. Exactly! It is the height of genius to be able to produce ethical results on economic grounds--to make safety a paying proposition.”

The only declared opposition to social insurance in principle comes from the groups that our industrial evolution has segregated at the opposite extremes of the economic scale-the violent conservatives and the violent revolutionists. The violent conservatives believe that all life is a fateful struggle between individuals, and that any attempt to interfere with this struggle through legislation is nothing more than a sentimental effort to

protect the unfit and thus to poison the blood of the fit in their heroic battle with nature. The violent revolutionists believe, too, that the law of life is war, but in their minds the struggle is not between individuals, but between groups, and they preach the predestined dominion of the working-class. Any attempt to avert the proletarian revolution by ameliorative legislation they scorn as an attempt to blunt the fighting edge of the workers and a subversion of the revolt through which alone the "wage-slaves" can break their chains.

Between these extremes stand the great heterogeneous masses of the people whose common thought is prevailing public opinion, equally opposed to the violence of the militant individualist and the militant revolutionist; instinctively holding all life sacred; perpetually pre-occupied with the healthy, just, and normal development of the whole nation; striving to curb the centrifugal militancy of the extremes and to lead all groups to subordinate their special interests to the common interests of all. Social insurance is a part of this effort. It is inspired by faith in the possibility of a peaceful approach to wisdom and justice in human affairs. It is an appeal from violence to constructive human intelligence-an attempt to substitute mutual aid for war.

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE WITH WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION 1

Experience under the American compensation statutes has justified in fair measure the hopes and claims of those who have advocated the legislation. It has not been millennial. But it has realized no small part of the advantages which were predicted. So much may be stated with entire confidence and after due allowance for the present incompleteness of definitely relevant data. In fact, a reasonably confident conclusion of that character might be reached without examining any of the detailed reports upon the practical working of the statutes and with only a knowledge of the rate at which the compensation system has been extended from state to state. Ten years ago the early and ready acceptance of workmen's compensation in

1 From article by Willard C. Fisher, New York University. American Economic Review. 10:18-47. March, 1920.

other lands was urged as a strong argument for the enactment of compensation legislation in this country. It was pointed out that within a quarter century the newer principles and policy for the relief of employees injured in industry had been adopted in some forty foreign jurisdictions, including all of the industrially important ones, and that, once adopted, there nowhere had ever been any serious proposal to give them up.

But foreign readiness to enact compensation laws has been more than matched in the United States. It is not yet nine years since the first of the really effective American workmen's compensation statutes were enacted. Yet such laws now have been enacted in forty-two of the forty-eight states and in Alaska, Porto Rico, and Hawaii. Only the District of Columbia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas are still without compensation statutes. And a late appropriation for the District of Columbia brings all public employees in that jurisdiction under the provisions of the federal workmen's compensation law. It is not credible that the states would have taken action so speedily, one after another and in full knowledge of what had been done elsewhere, often in adjacent states, except upon conviction that the action taken was of proved wisdom. Doubtless none of the tardier legislatures knew every effect of the earlier enactments. Nobody knows as much as that, even now. But they did know, through universal report and belief, that of evil effects there had been as good as none and that general results had been eminently satisfactory. And upon such knowledge they acted.

men.

There is other general evidence of the same presumptive character. As in foreign lands, so in America there has been never a voice raised for the repeal of the statutes. Rather the tendency of legislation everywhere has been to go farther, to strengthen and improve the first laws. The field of the acts has been broadened somewhat, by the inclusion of additional workRates of compensation have been increased in various ways, by higher percentile ratings upon wages, by raising the fixed maxima, by shortening the waiting periods, by extending the duration of the payments, by more liberal provisions for medical care, and in still other minor ways. The original limitation to accidental injuries has been done away in a few states. The certainty of payments to injured employees has been made greater, by stricter requirements of insurance and by corrections

of administrative procedure. And the simpler and more summary administration by boards or commissions, rather than through the courts of law, has been increasingly favored.

By many tokens employers have shown their approval of the system. There are, to be sure, some regrettable failures of the optional statutes to win acceptance by employers. But these are not very numerous, relatively. Much the larger numbers of the employers affected have accepted their new obligations cheerfully. In the states in which the employer's acceptance of the optional statute is presumed, in the absence of his notification to the contrary, positive rejections have been few. And in states with optional statutes there have been a great many purely voluntary elections of the compensation system by employers who have been under no constraint of fear that they might have to face suits at law without their old-time common law defenses. So in California in 1918 there had been more than twenty thousand such voluntary elections which had been formally notified to the Industrial Accident Commission, and in addition to these an unknown number of others which had been legally implied by the taking out of compensation insurance. And, in fact, a good part of the liberalizing amendments to which reference has been made have had the support of employers, or even have been proposed by them.

Employees have become even more cordial than employers in their approval. Unorganized laborers, of course, on the farms and elsewhere, never were on record, or even heard as to their wishes about workmen's compensation. But organized laborers, as a rule, were at first skeptical or positively hostile. It was but natural that the representatives and spokesmen of the labor unions, knowing little about the measures proposed for their avowed benefit, and by outsiders at that, should be doubtful of the real advantage to themselves. The verdicts for large sums now and then won in personal injury actions loomed in their minds as the grand prizes of the lottery loom in the minds of ticket-holders. And they did not appreciate fairly the fact that the compensation awards, limited although they might be, would come very much oftener than the rich damage verdicts. In 1909 Mr. Samuel Gompers, as president of the American Federation of Labor, declared his preference for an improved employers' liability law. Two years later the president of the Connecticut Federation of Labor appeared in his official capacity at a legis

lative hearing to oppose a pending workmen's compensation bill, announcing that the organized laborers of Connecticut wished rather a simple abolition of the common law principle of the fellow-servant. In Illinois the opposition to early proposals of workmen's compensation had some of its sharpest, even bitterest, expressions by organized laborers. But now, after a few years of experience with compensation, laborers, both organized and unorganized, are generally enthusiastically in favor of it, not necessarily in its present typical form and with its commonest limitations but, certainly as a general principle and in contrast with employers' liability. Perhaps the great railway unions, to whose highly paid members the modest maxima of the ordinary compensation awards appear particularly unjust, are the only important bodies of laborers who cannot be considered as now having renounced their former hostility.

It is clear also that the doubts and fears and the opposition which were so widespread among the general public a few years ago have been dissolved. When the agitation for workmen's compensation was first gathering strength some ten years ago, and even after the earliest statutes had gone into effect, many among those who could not properly be regarded either as employers or as industrially employed, and who, therefore, were not directly affected, were decidedly skeptical about proposals to import such radical European measures, if, indeed, they did not range themselves definitely with the opposition. But now-what a change! It is not merely that employers, high and low, great and small, are old and ardent friends of workmen's compensation at least such of them as declare themselves at all. So also are the insurance men. So also are nearly all audible workers. And among other classes of the general public it is scarcely possible now to find a well informed person who is not friendly. Truly it is a marvel that the struggle for compensation laws could have been so hard: there are so many long-time friends on every side. But, at any rate, there have been enough reversals of judgment to make present public opinion emphatically favorable to the new system. And this general and cordial approval of workmen's compensation is of greater practical importance than may appear at first. It has had and continues to have important bearing upon judicial decisions as to the validity and the practical meaning of the laws.

But much more to the point, under the American system of government, is the fact that the constitutionality and the