The matter of labor legislation is of such world-wide importance 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 hand, the law has the effect of postponing marriage for the first four years of a woman’s employment, as it practically imposes a penalty upon a woman marrying before four years from the time when she begins to pay to the State insurance money.

[Footnote 1:  U.S.  Industrial Commission Reports, vol.  V, pp. 228-241.]