mportance that
a word or two may not be out of place concerning recent legislation in
other countries. Other than factory and sweat-shop acts and hours
of labor laws, there are three great lines of modern legislation in
Europe, North America, and Australasia: employers' liability, old-age
pensions, minimum wage. On the first point, the tendency of modern
legislation, as has been intimated, is to make the employer liable in
all cases for personal injuries suffered in his employ without regard
to contributory negligence or the cause of the accident. That is, it
is in the nature of an insurance which the employer is made to carry
as part of his business expenses. It has the great advantage of
doing away with litigation and confining his liability to reasonable
amounts, and in the writer's opinion is in the long run for the
benefit of the employer himself. There is one exception. The employer
is not liable when the injury was caused by the wilful misconduct of
the workman injured.

Old-age pensions, or State insurance against old age as well as
disability, now exist in several countries, notably Germany, New
Zealand, and England. The German law[1] is much the most intelligent
and the least communistic in that it provides that half the fund is
raised by deductions made from the wages of the workmen themselves.
It applies to all persons, male and female, employed under salary or
wages as workmen, journeymen, apprentices, or servants; also to all
industrial workmen, skilled laborers, clerks, porters, and assistants;
also to all other persons whose occupation consists principally in
the service of others, such as teachers who do not receive an annual
salary of more than five hundred dollars; also to sailors and railway
employees; also to domestic servants. No one is obliged to insure
himself who is over the age of seventy, and no one is bound to insure
who does not work in a required insurance class for more than twelve
weeks or fifty days in each year. When women get married, they insist
on reimbursement of one half of all the insurance assessments they
have paid up to that time, provided such assessments amount to two
hundred weeks, or four years--a provision which must very much help
out marriages, and from which the amusing deduction may be drawn that
the average value of a husband in Germany is considered to be about
one-half the expense of supporting his wife for a period of two
hundred weeks, or four years. On the other