192
THE GREEN BAG
undoubtedly much greater here than in Great Britain where tradition has maintained high professional standards. Governor Bates' Commission of 1903 was headed by Dr. Carroll D. Wright, perhaps the foremost American authority upon labor problems. The other members were manu facturers, economists, and business men. They reported a bill shaped upon the British act. But it was killed in the committee of the legislature to which it was referred, ap parently upon the ground that Massachusetts could not afford to give aid and comfort to foreign competition by increasing the cost of production of commodities manufactured within her borders. How far this reasoning was justified, it is difficult to say. It is to be feared that the benefits afforded to em ployees were not sufficiently insisted upon; and it is difficult to believe that the same considerations which applied in 1897 to the industries of free trade in England, would not apply equally to those of Massachusetts, or to forget that the same arguments were made in regard to the Massachusetts Employers' Liability Act in 1887 that are to-day applied to the Compensation Act. But the real answer to the objection is that conditions are becoming intolerable and that we are fast coming to a time where all indus trial communities must recognize the pro priety, from a practical as well as an economic standpoint, of putting the burden of indus trial waste upon the consumer. Although it seems improbable that there is reason to fear a radical change in cost of production resulting from the introduction of a Compensation Law, yet in a country of diversified conditions, where industrial characteristics and the cost of production in so far as they have settled themselves at all have done so only after violent oscil lations between a state of under produc
tion and a state of over production, one hesitates to pray for any legislation that might through mere apprehension add a disturbing factor to so precarious an indus trial equilibrium. It does not appear that it is the function of the Federal government to effect general legislation along the lines of a Compensa tion Act; and we can hardly hope for a simultaneous adoption of the same remedy by all of the states. The objection of handi capping competing manufacturers, however, cannot apply to an act affecting public service corporations only; because the price obtained by the owners of a public fran chise for their commodity is fixed, like the price of the product of any other monopoly, by the limit which the people will pay or by legislative enactment but not to a great degree by competition. Of course the only method of affecting that most important branch of the public service, the interstate carrying trade, is to reach it from Wash ington by Federal Statute. State laws would then be confined to street railways, illuminating plants, water works, and per haps public labor generally — industries purely local in character. It is scarcely to be expected that the problems which we have been discussing can be left to work out their own solution without legislation. They are industrial problems created not by natural and eco nomic conditions alone, but by an artificial .regulation of these conditions. It may be that our methods and difficulties differ so far from those of the British that we cannot profit by their example; it may be that there are more effective solutions. But these are the questions to be determined — let us have all the light that discussion can give us. BOSTON, MASS., March, 1906.
