descend, we are scarcely yet in a position to say. Is this to be the contribution to economics in the twentieth century, of the country of Jefferson and Washington?

Fortunately for the world, the United States is not likely to make this experiment. The millions of common laborers, however poor and degraded they may be, or may become, are yet citizens and voters,-are, moreover, the inheritors, even if of alien race, of glorious traditions of manhood and freedom. That uncontrolled personal power which several centuries of struggle have displaced from the throne, the castle, and the altar, is not likely to be allowed to rule in the farm, the factory, and the mine. As yet, the American citizen still believes himself to be free, and sees not the industrial subjection into which he is rapidly passing. But it is not to be supposed that he will witness unmoved the successive failures of trade-unions and strikes, the general reductions in wages which will mark the first spell of bad trade, the manifold dismissals and "shuttings down," the progressive degradation of his class. He will take up every wild dream and every mad panacea. He will be tricked and outvoted again and again. But, if so, the result will be a "class war" more terrible than any the world has seen, and one in which, though the ultimate victory will be with the common people, American civilization may go back several generations.

Yet America ought to avoid this catastrophe. The experiment has already been tried, and the remedy is known. If the people of the United States will but do that most difficult of all things, learn by the experience of other nations, they may get out of the Trusts all the advantages which these offer, without suffering the terrible calamity in which they unwittingly threaten to overwhelm American civilization. The remedy lies in what we in England are beginning to call the "Policy of the National Minimum." We must give up the idea of individual freedom of competition, which the combinations of capital have proved to be illusory, and take up, instead, the higher freedom of collective life. We must get back as a community what we have lost as individuals. The Policy of the National Minimum translates itself into

four main branches of legislative and executive activity. There will have to be a national minimum of wages. The Trusts, or the other employers, will be under no legal obligation to employ any person whatsoever. But if they do employ him or her, it will be a condition of every contract, not to be waived or ignored, that its terms shall not be such as will impair the efficiency of the citizen or diminish the vitality of the race. Το engage labor at wages insufficient to repair the waste of tissue caused by the employment is demonstrably to injure the community as a whole, and will be prosecuted as such in the criminal courts. Those whose labor is not worth the national minimum, -the aged, the crippled, and the blind; the mentally or morally deficient; the epileptic; and the chronically feckless and feebleminded,—will be maintained by the community. Of all the ways of maintaining those unable to earn a full livelihood, by far the most costly and injurious is to allow them to compete in the labor market, and thus to drag down by their very infirmity those who are whole. There are still people, of course, who simply cannot imagine how a legal minimum wage could possibly be enforced, just as there were, sixty years ago, economists who demonstrated the impossibility of factory laws. As a matter of fact, the legal minimum wage can be seen in force today both in Victoria and in New Zealand.

There will be a national minimum of leisure and recreation secured by law to every citizen. It will be an implied condition of every contract of employment, rigidly enforced by law, that it shall leave untouched sixteen hours out of each twenty-four for needful sleep, recreation, exercise of mind or body, and the duties of citizenship and family life. Any attempt by man or woman to sell for wages any part of the sixteen sacred hours will be blamed as virtual embezzlement, since this part of the twenty-four hours day must be regarded as necessarily reserved for the purpose of maintaining unimpaired the efficiency of the race. Any employer purchasing them, or allowing them to be spent in his mill or mine, will be prosecuted and punished, as if he had incited to embezzlement or had received stolen goods.

There will be a national minimum of sanitation, enforced not merely on real estate owners or occupiers, but also on local governing authorities. The nation will find it preposterous that any city, merely out of stupidity or incapacity or parsimony should foster disease, or bring up its quota of citizens in a condition of impaired vitality. The power of the community as a whole, will, somehow or other, be brought to bear upon every backward district, compelling it to lay on pure water, to improve its drainage, and to take such action, even by municipal building if need be, that no family in the land shall have less than "three rooms and a scullery," as the minimum required for health and decency. Along with this must go the adequate provision of medical attendance, skilled nursing, and hospital accommodation for the sick. Within a generation of the adoption of such a policy, the death rate and sickness experience shows a reduction of one third of what is at present endured as if it were the decree of Providence.

There will be a national minimum of education,—not merely in the provision of schools, but in genuinely compulsory attendance at them. Besides schools and colleges of every grade, there will have to be an adequate "scholarship ladder," securing maintenance as well as free tuition for every scholar proving himself or herself fitted for anything beyond common schooling. And this provision will be enforced by the national power upon local school authorities as well as upon parents and employers. What right has any part of the community to allow any part of its quota of citizens to be reared in ignorance or to suffer even one potential genius to be lost to the community?

It is my deliberate opinion that only by the enforcement of some such national minimum of subsistence, leisure, sanitation, and education will the United States escape degeneration and decay. Where life is abandoned to unfettered competition, what is known as "Gresham's Law" applies,—the bad drives out the good. To prevent this evil result, is, as America will discover in the twentieth century, the main function of government. To enforce the national minimum will, moreover, not interfere with the profits of the exceptional man, while it will enormously

increase the prosperity of the community. Nor does it abolish competition. What it does is to transfer the competitive pressure from the actual means of subsistence of the masses (where it works little but harm), to the intellect of every one who has any, in the degree that he has it (where it sharpens the wits).

This remedy for the dangers of the Trusts-the policy of the national minimum-involves, it will be seen, a great extension of government activity, a great advance in the efficiency of both legislative and executive machinery, and no little change in constitutional forms. All this will be difficult enough. Moreover, the consumer, as consumer, remains unprotected. It may, therefore, well be easier, in one industry after another, to take over the Trust into direct public ownership, as one nation or another has already done in the case of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, ocean cables, steamboat lines, water, gas, electric and hydraulic plants, and what not. One way or another the people must collectively control the industry by which they live, or both freedom and civilization will disappear.

THE ARMENIAN QUESTION AND EUROPE'

ARCHAG TCHOBANIAN, Paris.

Some years ago the massacres in Armenia aroused, throughout the civilized world, a great feeling of indignation against the Butcher, and a pitying sympathy for victims that were devoted, as Paul Adam expressed it, "to a misfortune without parallel." From 1894 to 1896, all independent and generous minds in Europe and America were profoundly interested in this sorrowful problem, of which they demanded an immediate solution. But now that we hear no longer of massacres and that the mind of the two worlds is absorbed in more recent and urgent political complications, the Armenian question seems to be completely forgotten. It no longer engages the attention of parliament or press, and with the exception of a noble few who are still cordially devoted to their cause, no one seems to be any longer interested in the Armenians. "More massacres, then more of the Armenian question" is the general thought. Philanthropists believe, for their part, that the massacres have ceased, and consider themselves as discharged from their duty towards this most unfortunate of all peoples.

This is a grievous mistake. In the first place, it is not true that blood has ceased to flow in Armenia. The Sultan no longer cuts the throats of ten thousand men in three days, as at Constantinople in 1896, or at Van in 1897; he no longer roasts his victims, as in the case of the three thousand shut up in a church at Orfa in 1895.

(1) Translated from the French MS. of M. Tchobanian by Ira W. Howerth, Ph. D., of the University of Chicago.

Copyright, 1902, by Frederick A. Richardson.