five and wounding more than twenty men, women, and children. The A. F. of L. Executive protested to President Wilson, and Congressman London also took the matter up in Congress.

URUGUAY.

Uruguay is the smallest, the most densely peopled, and in many respects the most progressive of the South American republics. Land ownership is widely distributed, and this has strengthened the workings of political democracy. Onefourth of the population is in the capital, Montevideo, which is an important shipping point and has large meat-packing, glass, leather, paper, and other industries. The Socialist and Labor movement is mostly confined to this city. The Socialist party was organized in 1905. In 1911, with the aid of the Radicals, it elected Prof. Emilio Frugoni to the Chamber. In 1914, however, Radical support was withdrawn and at the same time the party was attacked by Anarchists in the Labor Federation, with the result that the seat was lost. The party has about 500 dues-paying members and two weekly papers, its organ being "El Socialista," published at the capital.

In the French colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyana there are active Socialist groups. The two latter have each sent a Socialist to the Chamber of Deputies at Paris (Légitime and Franconie, respectively) and in Martinique there is one Socialist, Lagrosillière, in the colonial legislature and several in municipal councils.

SOUTH AFRICA.

The Act of Union vested the executive government in the King and his successors, a Governor-General advised by an executive council and ministers of state. Legislative power was vested in a Parliament composed of the King, a Senate of forty members, eight nominated for 10 years by the Governor-General in council, and eight elected from each original province by the two Houses of the Colonial Legislature sitting together; and a House of Assembly consisting of members chosen as follows: From the Cape Colony 51; Natal 17; Transvaal 36; Orange Free State 17. The Governor-General has the power to summon, prorogue and dissolve Parliament, which meets annually.

Only since the Act of Union of 1909, when the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Natal and the Cape Colony were merged in the Union of South Africa has South Africa evolved a united political and economic labor movement. This movement, at least that part of it which represents the coal and metal mining industries, directs its attacks equally against the capitalist exploiters and its colored competitors.

The colored population forms by far the larger portion of the population, 4,700,000 out of less than 6,000,000. According to law they can become neither miners nor engineers. Because diamond mining is a very lucrative employment, the whites of South Africa thus hope to create a monopoly for themselves in this industry. What was done by law in the mining industry, has been accomplished in all other industries, at least wherever skilled labor is employed. The labor union movement, therefore, is white and anti-color.

The founding of the Labor Party of South Africa at the end of 1909 seemed to promise much for the future of the labor movement. In 1910 four representatives were elected, and soon after, the important city of Johannesburg went almost completely labor-socialistic at a municipal election. But a bitter struggle soon arose between capital and labor, in which the government under Louis Botha took a frankly one-sided stand. The militia was placed at the disposal of the capitalists to help them win their fight. Sharp conflicts were frequent in 1913. The government sought to end the trouble by deporting, without trial, a number of the leading labor leaders. A general strike was the immediate answer. Bitter recriminations arose in Parliament when Creswell, the leader of the Labor Party, sharply attacked the Botha government. An election held soon after resulted in a gratifying increase for the Labor Party. In the Transvaal, where the strike movement had been most bitter, 23 out of 25 elected deputies were members of the Labor Party. There the vote of the Labor Party was 26,108, of the Conservatives 12,305, of the Nationalists 3,029. In the Transvaal the Parliament consists of only 45 members, so that the Labor Party had the majority and, in consequence, control of the government. When the war broke out the prospects for the general election of 1915 were very bright, but the war caused a split in the movement. Creswell, who was on his way to England to secure the assistance of the Labor movement of Great Britain, returned immediately, joined Louis Botha's army and went with it on its campaign to South West Africa. This called forth decided protests from those members of the working-class who refused to acknowledge an armistice between capital and labor. The dispute culminated in the resignation of twenty of the leading members of the party, among them W. H. Andrews, just before the election of July, 1915. These comrades published a manifesto in which they declared that international solidarity was more important than the triumph of Great Britain's armed forces. Instead of the seven members, who had been members of the last Parliament, only four were returned. Neither "Major" Creswell nor Andrews were re-elected. The Inter

nationalist and anti-militarist element, under the leadership of Andrews and Ivan Jones, organized the International League, which immediately published a weekly paper, The International.

The Labor Unions in South Africa have 100.000 members, and are very strongly organized in the mining, engineering and building trades as well as on the railroads. There are labor unions in all the industries, though some of them are still very weak. Since the outbreak of the war, they are working hand in hand with the Labor Party, the same persons, frequently being members of both party and union executive committees.

The Secretary of the Labor Party is Reginald G. Barlow, Trades Hall, Johannesburg, P. O. Box 4509.

The Secretary of the "International League" is D. Ivan Jones, 6 Trades Hall, Johannesburg, P. O. Box 4179.

AUSTRALIA.

The Commonwealth of Australia consists of the six original Australian colonies: New South Wales, Victória, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. Each of these is a self-governing State, except as to the powers reserved to the Confederation. The Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed at Sydney January 1, 1901. Legislative power is vested in a Federal Parliament, consisting of the King, represented by a Governor-General, a Senate and a House of Representatives. The Senate consists of 36 Senators, six for each State, chosen for six years. The House of Representatives consists of 75 members, distributed as follows: New South Wales 27; Victoria 22; Queensland 9; South Australia 7; Western Australia 5; and Tasmania 5.

The labor movement in Australia, like that of the mother country travelled, for a long time, in the rut of capitalist politics. But when the Seaman's strike, or correctly speaking, lockout of 1890, showed the necessity of political action on the part of the working-class, the political development of the proletariat of Australia progressed much more rapidly and uniformly than in England itself. The labor unions, which up to that time, had supported the doctrine of no politics in the unions, took in hand the formation of political party organizations in all the States, and soon gained recognition and political influence.

But the Australian Labor Party is by no means a Socialist Party. Though it is more radical than the British Labor Party and goes further in its present demands than the former, neither in its program nor in practice does it demand the socialization of the means of production. On the other hand, the Labor Party has enforced important political and economic reforms, as for instance, woman suffrage, old age pensions, minimum wage laws and the beginnings of a kind

of state Socialism expressed in government control of great monopolies and corporations, with a few attempts toward state ownership.

The growth of the Labor Party of Australia was phenomenally rapid. The following statistics show how, in state and nation, the number of representatives increased from year to year.

In 1914 the Labor Party polled 1,040,000 votes, the antiLabor candidates 933,000. In 1913 the vote had been as follows: Labor Party candidates, 1,004,000 and anti-Labor 887,000 votes. In 1914 the Labor Party had a majority in all states except Victoria. More recently a small majority in Western Australia has become a small minority. As the above tables show, the Labor Party has a majority in the National Parliament, a majority which is considerably larger in the Senate than in the House. After the election, the administration was again carried on by the Labor Party, with Andrew Fisher as Prime Minister for the third time. In 1915 he retired to become High Commissioner for the Commonwealth in London. He was succeeded by Hughes, who had been Attorney-General. The Australian Labor Party had become more radical in the two years before the war, and in consequence lost, at the last election in September, 1914, a large part of its middle class and farmer element. The closer it approached collectivist ideas, particularly when it demanded the nationalization of a number of industries, the greater became the opposition of the strong democratic liberal press, which had tentatively sided with the Labor Party during its more conservative stage. The labor press of Australia is as

yet hardly developed. The labor movement has several official organs, the principal being The Australian Worker, Sydney, N. S. W., and The Queensland Worker, Brisbane, Q., and also three dailies and several other weekly papers.

Besides the reforms already mentioned, the Labor Party was instrumental in passing a maternity law, providing for the payment of $25.00 to every mother on the birth of a child. It also deserves credit for the building of a transcontinental nationally owned and operated railway, a tax on land values for the purpose of breaking up large estates, for employers' liability law, for labor invalidity and old age pensions and a number of other social measures. The meagerness of this list, as even the Australian Socialists who are the keenest critics of the Labor Party admit, is to be attributed mainly to the constitutional limitations, which, here, too, serve the purpose of hindering all real progress, while it must be said that the fetish of "practical politics," puts an end to every broadly conceived plan of social improvement. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the Labor Party in its desire to win the support of the farmer element often strove to mask its working class character, and pretended to be a producers' party, which finally stamped it as a middle class movement. Nevertheless it must be said in favor of the Labor Party, that, in spite of all the shortcomings, the educational value of the political labor movement is extraordinary, and that the purely socialistic movement, as represented by the S. L. P. in New South Wales, the Socialist Party of Victoria and the West Australian Socialist Party, all small in number, is gaining greater influence in the Labor Party from year to year.

At the outbreak of the war, the Labor Party at once placed the Fleet of the Commonwealth at England's disposal, and raised an army through voluntary enlistment. Up to July 1916, 325,000 men had volunteered. The Socialists in the Labor Party protested vigorously against supporting British Imperialism. In this they won such a measure of support within the Labor Party that the government found it advisable to curtail the anti-war agitation by a so-called "War Precautions Act," which gave it practically full power to suppress the rights of citizens. This law intended at first to apply only to military questions, soon assumed the character of a wide spread censorship. The Socialist newspapers, the Melbourne Socialist and others, suffered bitterly under this curtailment of the right of free press. Free speech was prohibited everywhere. Clashes with the police, who attempted to disturb and disperse peace demonstrations, were frequent. The official Labor Party men, particularly the