pected, will cost only about $12,500,000, and it will be several years
before the maximum expenditure of $25,000,000 is reached. But the
measure is radical in several particulars: it applies to clerks,
domestic servants, and many other classes usually not reached by
measures of the kind,--a total of some 14,000,000 persons; it provides
$5,000,000 a year for the maintenance of sanatoria for tuberculosis and
creates new health boards to improve sanitation and educate the people
in hygiene; and it furnishes physicians and medicines for the insured,
thus organizing practically the whole medical force and drug supply as
far as the masses are concerned.

In fact, the whole scheme may be looked on not so much as a measure to
aid the sick and wounded of industry financially, as to set at work an
automatic pressure working towards the preservation of the health,
strength, and productive capacity of the people, and incidentally to the
increase of profits. As Mr. Lloyd George said in an interview printed in
the _Daily Mail_: "I want to make the nation more healthy than it is.
The great mass of illness which afflicts us weighs us down and is easily
preventable. It is a better thing to make a man healthy than to pay him
so much a week when he is ill."

Mr. Lloyd George points out that the German employers have found that
the governmental insurance against accidents has proved a good
investment:--

"When Bismarck was strengthening the foundation of the new German
Empire, one of the very first tasks he undertook was the
organization of a scheme which insured the German workmen and their
families against the worst evils arising from these common
accidents of life. And a superb scheme it was. It has saved an
incalculable amount of human misery to hundreds of thousands and
possibly millions of people.

"Wherever I went in Germany, north or south, and whomever I met,
whether it was an _employer_ or a workman, a _Conservative_ or a
Liberal, a Socialist or a Trade-union Leader--men of all ranks,
sections and creeds, with one accord joined in lauding the benefits
which have been conferred upon Germany by this beneficent policy.
Several wanted extensions, but there was not one who wanted to go
back. The employers admitted that at first they did not quite like
the new burdens it cast upon them, _but they now fully realized the
advantages which even they deriv