at many
German statesmen make no such claims in private, whatever they may say
in public.

Some of the barren figures, needing no comment, are of
interest in this connection. The cost of insurance in Germany has
risen to over $500,000 a day, the total cost of state insurance
exceeding $250,000,000 a year at the present time, a fairly heavy tax
upon small employers. In 1909, of 422,076 decisions by the industrial
unions, 76,352 were appealed against, and of the 100,000 arbitration
judgments, 22,794 were appealed against. So difficult is it to settle
to the claimant's satisfaction the amount of salve necessary for his
particular wound when, as is true in these cases, the salve is a grant
of money for a longer or shorter period!

In 1886 there were, roughly,
100,000 accidents reported and 10,000 compensated, but as they became
more thoroughly acquainted with the game, the figures rose in 1908 to
662,321 accidents and 142,965 compensations.

The vast increase of the
claims for trifling injuries is shown by the fact that in twenty years
from 1888 to 1908, despite the increase of the total compensation from
$1,475,000 to $38,715,000, the average compensation per accident fell
from $58.50 to $38.83. In the two years 1907 to 1909 the number of
members of those state-insured increased by 380,819, while the days of
sickness increased by 26,219,632! The cost of sickness insurance alone
rose from $42,895,000 in 1900 to $83,640,000 in 1909. The Workmen's
Compensation Act in England costs, for management, commission, legal
and medical fees, $20,000,000 a year, while the compensation paid out
was $13,500,000. The insurance companies calculate that for every $500
of compensation, the employers have paid $750!

It is becoming increasingly evident that the logical result of state
charity, or call it state insurance to avoid controversy, over a large
field, and including millions of beneficiaries and claimants, is that
the army of officials, the expenses of administration, and the
payments themselves must sooner or later break the back of the state
morally, politically, and financially. It rapidly increases parasitism
among the receivers; makes a powerful though indifferent army of state
servants of the distributers; and loses financially to the state far
more in expense of administration, and loss of useful labor of the
army of civil servants, than it gains by the loss to the state of
individual incapacity resulting in pauperism an