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ETTER preserve a good, clear, natural complexion than risk injury in attempts to improve upon it with harmful cosmetics.

Ivory Soap is the scientists' formula for cleansing, it is an aseptic solvent for the impurities of the body which have reached the surface through the pores. It preserves nature's handiwork by removing that which would destroy its beauty.

Vol. 72

The Outlook

Published Weekly

September 20, 1902

The eighteenth week A Struggle for Prestige of the miners' strike was full of rumors and predictions of an approaching settlement, but the nineteenth has begun with the rumors dead and the predictions falsified. The most serious effort to end the strike last week was that of Governor Stone and Mr. Widener, of Philadelphia, who held a long consultation with President Mitchell and the officials of the anthracite district unions. There were very definite rumors that Mr. Widener represented the wishes of Mr. Pierpont Morgan in the matter, and that Mr. Morgan was anxious for a settlement if one could be arranged at all acceptable to the Presidents of the coal roads which he controls. Unfortunately, however, these gentlemen have declared so explicitly that they would make no terms with the miners' union that Mr. Widener and Governor Stone were unable to go further than to advise the miners to go to work, counting upon the generosity of the operators to redress local grievances and provide better terms. All this, however, is merely rumor, and is only worth reporting because it indicates the nature of the present deadlock. Both sides are as tired of the fight as were the British and Boers of the conflict in South Africa, but so long as one side in that conflict made it a matter of honor to demand unconditional surrender, and the other not to accept it, the war had to go on. In the present case the conflict seems likely to continue until some terms can be proposed which can be charitably interpreted so as to save the prestige of the organizations on both sides. The most hopeful suggestion that has been made along this line is that the operators

No. 3

should formulate the terms they are willing to offer their men during the coming year of prospective prosperity, and that those terms should be submitted, not to the officers of the United Mine Workers, but to the men employed in the anthracite mines. President Mitchell has so frequently asserted his readiness to keep the recognition of his union out of the discussion, if better terms can be secured for the anthracite mine workers, that he could not afford to refuse to submit such an offer of the operators to the judgment of the miners. The original majority in favor of the strike was so small that a small concession might easily produce a majority in favor of peace.

The Wages of Coal-Miners

have been

During the present strike, though to a less extent than in the strike of 1900, there many conflicting statements regarding the ordinary wages of coalminers. Last week Mr. Henry S. Fleming, the Secretary of the Anthracite Coal Operators' Association, published in the New York Sun" a reply to the statements of Mr. F. J. Warne in his article in The Outlook of August 30. Mr. Warne, it may be recalled, spoke of thirty dollars a month as the ordinary wages of the adult mine workers. criticism Mr. Fleming says:

66

In

The present writer but a short time since made, with the consent and assistance of the various mining companies, a compilation of the wages earned both by the miners and day laborers, the total number of men affected by the averages representing over seventy-five per cent., or about 33,750,000 tons out of 45,000,000 tons of the anthracite coal mined.

Day labor was grouped in classes depend

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The two below $1 were boys picking slate and tending doors.

As against the assertion that the average earnings of the miners are $30 per month, this same investigation showed that, prior to the advance in 1900 of ten per cent. in the Wyoming region and nearly fourteen per per cent. in the Lehigh and Schuylkill, the net earnings of several thousand miners varied from a maximum of slightly above $6.50 per day to an average of almost $2.90; even on the average of 212 days, which includes idle time from numerous petty strikes, the average earnings of the miners was nearly $700 for the year, or double the amount guessed at in the article under consideration.

The statements as to daily wages contained in Mr. Fleming's table are entirely in harmony with those made by anthracite coal operators to the Federal statistical bureaus before the strike of 1900 made the subject a matter of heated class controversy. The statements, however, which Mr. Fleming makes about yearly wages are not in harmony with any of the official reports which have been published. Mr. Jacob Schoenhof, the well-known economist, published only last week in the New York "Evening Post" a summary of the operators' returns published in the census of 1890, and it reads as follows:

Above ground-564 foremen and overseers, 291 days, at $2.71-$788.61; 4,720 mechanics, 257 days, at $1.91-$490.87; 23,779 laborers, 198 days, $1.29-$255.42; 17,191 boys, 185 days at 62 cents-$114.70.

Underground-737 foremen and overseers, 291 days, at $3.05-$887.55 per annum; 36,639 miners, 179 days, at $2.39-$427.81; 35,376 laborers, 184 days, at $1.64-$301.76; 4,770 boys, 180 days, at 88 cents-$158.40. Total employees about mines, 123,676. Average earnings of all employed, $314.21.

If from this table we exclude the returns made for the breaker-boys and boys down in the mines, the wages of the older mine workers, including foremen and overseers, appear to average almost exactly three hundred and fifty dollars a year. This return agrees closely with that made a little later by operators in the Hazleton districts, and published in the Senate report on wages (the Aldrich report) in 1893. The operators who furnished these reports to the Government had no motive for understating the wages.

Governor Cummins on the Trusts

The conflict among Iowa

Republicans over a revision of the tariff to prevent

trust extortion seems to have left the revisionists in almost undisputed possession of the field. Governor Cummins and his supporters have appealed to the antimonopoly sentiment which once made Iowa Republicanism the synonym of radicalism, and the appeal has called forth an enthusiastic response from the rank and file of the party. Governor Cummins, in a recent interview with Mr. Walter Wellman, of the Chicago" Record-Herald," has put very tersely the economic philosophy upon which the tariff revision movement rests. His words were as follows:

Competition is the fundamental principle of industrial life. Anything that checks competition is inimical to the public good. We do not speak now of monopolies in patents, or in franchises for public utilities, but of manufacturing and production in the ordinary sense. The legitimate purpose of the tariff is to equalize the cost of production abroad and at home. There is no morality in a tariff that goes beyond that. The tariff question is more or less involved in what is called the trust question, because of the marked tendency of the time. This tendency is toward combination. Many combinations are formed for the sole purpose of issuing watered stocks and working them off upon the public. In others the prime motive is to stifle competition. Indeed, there can be no other rational motive after a certain point in the search for economy has been reached. The economy of combinations does not pass a certain limit of size. In fact, after a certain line is crossed, the tendency is the other way. We Republicans of lowa propose to say to the creators of these combinations: "You may have a reasonable tariff. You may have profits, and large profits, if you are successful. But the moment you establish a monopoly you shall have the favor of the tariff taken from you."

Governor Cummins went on to state that the Iowa Republicans did not demand a general tariff revision and were not concerned as to just how much protection should be given to manufacturers who were really competing with one another and with foreign rivals, but whenever a monopoly was established they demanded that "the duty must disappear for the purpose of restoring competition." When asked for an example of a monopoly which should be deprived of protection, Governor Cummins replied: "Well, take tin plate and steel rails; take barbed wire, which has been an absolute monopoly for four or five years. The prices of this and

kindred articles are exorbitant because of the monopoly, as I have discovered by investigation." When asked how much too high the prices of these articles were, the Governor replied: "About one hundred per cent." The only part of Governor Cummins's programme which suggested any lack of determination to destroy at once the protection of trusts by the tariff was his recommendation that it be left to a Cabinet officer to determine whether or not competition in any article of trade has been destroyed, so that the sheltering tariff should be removed. The question whether an industry should be protected by the tariff is distinctively a legislative one, and the proposal that Congress shall simply legislate against the protection of trusts without specifying what articles shall be placed upon the free list is another proposal for "reform in the abstract," which need never be applied to concrete conditions. It requires fearless and incorruptible and unswervable executive officers to enforce explicit legislation against powerful monopolies, and it is preposterous to expect such officers to give drastic reality to a vague fulmination. Innumerable embarrassments would confront an executive officer who proceeded against a monopoly without the clearest warrant in law.

Conventions

The Republican Conventions Last Week's held last week in Washington, Nevada, Utah, and Texas all declared in favor of the nomination of President Roosevelt as the party's candidate in 1904. In this respect they followed the example already set by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Idaho, and the cumulative effect of all these expressions has been to force Senator Platt, of New York, to revise his previous position and favor a similar expression from the New York Convention about to meet. In Utah, last week, there was serious division over the question of indorsing the President's reciprocity policy toward Cuba, and in the end the beet-sugar interests prevailed. These interests are strong in Utah, where the sugar-beet is unusually profitable upon the irrigated farms. Nevertheless, Utah and California are the only two States in the Far West in

which the beet-sugar "insurgents" have controlled the Republican Conventions, and if the President should explicitly demand the Cuban reciprocity bill which passed the House, and by which the Sugar Trust was deprived of protection, it is believed that few "insurgent" Congressmen could stand against him. The Democratic Convention in Colorado was notable for its rejection of the terms of fusion offered by the Populists, and its decision to conduct an independent campaign. Senator Teller, however, was made the Convention's candidate for the United States Senate, thus formally enrolling him as a Democratic leader, and conciliating his personal supporters among the Populists and Silver Republicans. The Colorado Democratic Convention of course indorsed the Kansas City platform, but the New Hampshire Convention, held at the same time, did not. It did, however, adopt a radical platform, demanding for the Philippines free trade now and entire independence at an early date, and demanding the abolition of all tariffs on trust-made articles, and the passage of a new anti-trust law prohibiting corporations (other than banks and insurance companies) from holding stock in other corporations. Under the present National banking law, National banks are not permitted to own the stock of other National banks, and the New Hampshire plan is to prevent the combination of competing manufacturing establishments in the same way that the National banking law has prevented the establishment of a great banking combination.

Campaign

The political campaign in The Pennsylvania Pennsylvania has opened with more than usual activity. The Republicans will wage their campaign on National lines, maintaining that these are paramount. The Democrats, on the other hand, are confining themselves to State issues, and are pressing these with vigor and persistence. The Republican position has been unintentionally caricatured by the remarkable statement of Judge Pennypacker, the gubernatorial candidate, that "Pennsylvania has no ills worthy of mention." This utterance, with his reiterated eulogy of Senator Quay, has served

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