attract the wiser manufacturers, but it certainly will not attract those with shorter vision, and it will have no influence at all with the small employers of child labour, with the shopkeeper, with the innumerable homes where little girls and boys are domestic drudges or supporters of small industries. It must be made compulsory, because at the very highest estimate not one-fourth of the two million children who are now at work will come into a half-time school under a voluntary system. Moreover, some contribution towards the cost of a half-time system must come from the employers and, where the parent is the employer, from the parent. This will not bring down the rate of wages: child labour is cheap, and when the supply is restricted its price will rise. But the solution must be supplemented in another way. The labour of children under fourteen at school must be absolutely forbidden. The momentary dislocation can be met by the employment of elderly labour. Evidence shows that the labour of the child tends to throw the man over fifty-five out of work. Child part-time workers can be replaced by adult part-time workers. Employers will have to adapt themselves to the system; men in want of work will have to do the same. Part-time labour is common among women, and among men in certain trades such as jobbing gardening. It will have to be extended to industries such as the distribution of milk and newspapers. The system has long existed in the Post Office. The real danger at the moment is the want of courage that successive Governments since 1833 have shown in the education question. The day of educational evasions and approximate solutions is over. Four years have passed since the Consultative Committee, the Interdepartmental Committee, and the Poor Law Commissioners revealed our disastrous position. To wait longer is to

endanger our national life.

To sum up: The country is face to face with an economic problem of extraordinary difficulty, but one that is soluble by generalship and unity of purpose.' Interdepartmental action can deal effectively with the question of labour if the Board of Education can deal with the question of education. Miss Dunlop and Mr. Denman advocate the raising of the school age, the creation of compulsory half-time education, the further regulation of employment out of school hours,

and the appointment of Juvenile Advisory Committees. Certainly this minimum will be resented neither by the public, the parents, nor the employers; and it must come very soon if England is to maintain her historic position. We have said nothing in this paper on the subject of religious teaching, and have indeed assumed throughout that the immemorial and necessary alliance between education and religion will continue. It is noticeable that that section of our system which is entirely divorced from religion—the evening schools —is ineffective, undisciplined and without a friend. State education without religion has served the nation ill in the United States and in France and not better in India. 'The 'most thoughtful minds in India'—says Sir Harcourt Butler in the recent Resolution of the Government of India on Education- lament the tendency of existing systems of 'education to develop the intellectual at the expense of 'the moral and religious faculties.' From this evil, at any rate, we have been partly spared, and the fact reveals the soul of goodness in our educational system.

J. E. G. DE MONTMORENCY.

NATIONAL INSURANCE AND NATIONAL
CHARACTER.

I. Unerwünschte Folgen der Deutschen Sozialpolitik. By Professor LUDWIG BERNHARD. Berlin: Julius Springer. 1912.

2. Malingering and Feigned Sickness. By Sir JOHN COLLIE, assisted by ARTHUR H. SPICER. Arnold. 1913.

3. Die Reichsversicherungsordnung, Aerzte und Publikum. By Professor H. QUINCKE. Reprinted from the Schlesische Zeitung. Breslau: W. G. Korn. 1911.

4.

Über den Einfluss der Sozialen Gesetze auf den Charakter. By Professor H. QUINCKE. Reprinted from the Schlesische Zeitung. Breslau W. G. Korn. 1905.

5. Geisteskrankheit und Kultur. By Professor A. HOCHE. Freiburg Speyer and Kaerner. 1910.

6. Notwendige Reformen der Unfallversicherungsgesetze.

Professor A. HOCHE.

Halle : Carl Marhold.

1907.

7. Official Reports of the German Imperial Insurance Office.

By

'It is good also not to try experiments in States except the necessity be urgent, or the utility evident and well to beware that it be the reformation which draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation; and lastly that the novelty, though it be not rejected, yet be held for a suspect.'-Bacon.

'The State can be compared with a living organism on which one must experiment with care.'-Bismarck.

"The tragedy of all great reform movements" lies in this, that the unintended results are more powerful than the intended results.'-Professor Bernhard.

THER

HE purpose of this article is to set forth some of the unintended and unforeseen results to which Professor Bernhard above refers, and to show how the State in its efforts to regulate and to assist has set up influences which have wrought harm, moral and material, to so many of the persons concerned that the direct and intended benefits have in some cases been bought at too high a cost.* The authors of German insurance legislation and their English imitators equally forgot

* Part of that purpose is to show that our recent English experiments in social reform involve some of the worst of these evils, but that it is still possible with forethought and due regard for experience gained to counteract or even to reverse the influences which are inexorably drawing on these evils.

that each novelty should be held for a suspect' until foresight has freed it from influences which tend to sap the vital elements of character, or to check the growth of qualities which are of the greatest value in national development. We cannot afford to neglect these considerations, because the material well-being of a nation depends far more on its character than upon the regulations which its laws impose or the assistance which they give.

It is probably safe to assume that, whenever a government has stepped in to regulate matters which concern the life of the individual, the primary motive has been entirely admirable and that in most cases the need has been a pressing one. In any case this will be freely conceded in regard to all the enactments to which this article refers. They may be roughly classified as they affect respectively: (1) The conditions of family life.

Here the recent experiments which concern us relate to the provision of old age pensions and the feeding of necessitous school-children; but no great distance of time parts us from the introduction of free and compulsory education and other modern departures of the greatest importance but too numerous to touch upon here.

(2) The relations between employer and employed.

Up to a comparatively recent date it was a principle of our legislation to avoid interference between employer and employed. Now, in addition to regulations to protect workers from exposure to undue risks, we have recently revised and greatly extended the law as to accidents and industrial disease, and have embarked upon new experiments in regard to the limitation of hours of employment, the provision of employment, and even the regulation of wages.

(3) The mutual organisations of wage earners.

This is probably the most complex and difficult sphere into which the State can enter with its regulations and its assistance. It includes the whole field of insurance and of mutual help such as friendly societies, workmen's clubs, trade unions, and co-operative societies have been wont to provide. Until last year this domain was in England free from State control, but now our legislation has made what is financially, and in many other ways, the largest experiment in social reform which has ever been made here or elsewhere.

If we bring together under the head of insurance some cognate matters referred to above, the position now is that here, as in Germany, the State provides or assists in providing the insurances relating to accident, sickness, prolonged invalidity, old age, childbirth, medical treatment, and (within certain limits) unemployment, and wherever assistance is given there is practically complete State control accompanied by compulsion and rigid uniformity. On the other hand, life insurance and the support of widows, orphans, and other dependants are not yet under State control in this country excepting to a limited extent in cases of death by accident. In order to form some idea of how this branch of social reform legislation is likely to affect national life and character, it is highly important to study the results already produced in Germany; for whereas our own experience in nearly all these branches of State activity is quite recent, Germany has had about thirty years' experience of compulsion and State regulation in connexion with national insurance as applied to sickness and to accident.

Before the German laws in question had been long in force the results of their influences began to excite strong comment from the medical profession. As each year has passed the volume and intensity of the warnings have increased. To-day German medical literature and medical discussion are engrossed by efforts to devise means of stemming the oncoming tide of unforeseen influences which are not only perverting the public opinion of a great part of the community and debasing its moral standards, but also actually attacking the physical stamina of the people.

The first indication of trouble was the appearance of a new form of nervous disease which began to attract attention even before the year 1890. This disease showed itself as a mental obsession on the part of insured persons that they were entitled to the benefits allowed by the Act. It was not long before this new form of hysteria became the theme of paper after paper by medical writers. The views expressed were at first divergent, but they ceased to be so as more experience was gained and fresh material accumulated. Up to 1899 doctors concentrated their researches almost entirely on the disease itself. They then began to turn to the cause of the trouble, with the result that social reform legislation quickly