The Hare System.

The Hare system, which is more flexible and free than the List system, is used for parliamentary elections in Denmark, Tasmania, and South Africa, and for city elections in the Transvaal. . It is to be used for the Senate and at least part of the House in Ireland. It has also recently been adopted by Ashtabula, Ohio, for the election of the City Council of seven.

Under this system the candidates of all parties are arranged in one list, with or without party names; the voter indicates his preferences among the candidates to any extent that he pleases; and the ballots are so sorted at the central electoral office (only the first choices being counted at the precincts) as to build up as many unanimous_constituencies of voters as there are seats to be filled. Each ballot is counted for the candidate whom the voter who cast it preferred among those who could actually use it in making up the quota of votes necessary to secure election.

During the last year strong movements for the adoption of proportional representation have developed in a number of American and Canadian cities, including Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Springfield, Mass. STATUS OF THE INITIATIVE, REFERENDUM AND

1 The Initiative applies to statutes but not to constitutional amend

STATE CONSTABULARY.

In 1905 Pennsylvania adopted a measure providing for a State Constabulary to be used for policing rural districts, and in labor disputes. The militia had been, on account of the experiences in the 1902 strike, when militia men fraternized with strikers, ineffective, and this more efficient weapon was devised. The Pennsylvania Constabulary has practically unlimited power in the way of making arrests and search; ing without warrant. Only the legislature, or the governor when the legislature is not in session, is its superior.

From the date of its inception, organized labor in Pennsylvania has opposed the Constabulary, and has agitated for its abolition. This action has been fought, so far successfully by the Manufacturers' Associations. The case for the constabulary as stated in a Manufacturers' Bulletin is as follows:

"Men and women in this state who own property should combine now in demanding that the dishonest element in labor organizations keep its hand off the state police.

"Manufacturers and employers whom it has saved from bankruptcy express themselves vigorously against any plan to abolish, restrict or hamper the force."

As against this argument Labor pits the findings of the Industrial Relations Commission that:

"It is an extremely efficient force for crushing strikes, but it is not successful in preventing violence in connection with strikes, in maintaining the legal and civil rights of the parties to the dispute, nor in protecting the public. On the contrary, violence seems to increase rather than diminish when the constabulary is brought into an industrial dispute; the legal and civil rights of the workers have on numerous occasions been violated by the constabulary and citizens not in any way connected with the dispute, and innocent of any interference with the constabulary have been brutally treated, and in one case shot down by members of the constabulary, who have escaped punishment for their acts. Organized upon a strictly military basis, it appears to assume in taking the field in connection with a strike, that the strikers are the enemies of the state and that a campaign should be waged against them as such."

Because of the supposed effectiveness of the State Constabulary in Pennsylvania, and in spite of the findings of the Industrial Relations Commission, New Jersey and New York attempted to pass laws establishing similar bodies. Organized labor, and radical influences, caused at least a temporary defeat of the measures.

PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT OFFICES.

BY WILLIAM M. LEISERSON.

In more than half the states there are employment offices or labor exchanges conducted either by the states or by municipalities, at a total cost roughly estimated at about $300,000 per year. All together about one hundred such state

and municipal offices are now in operation; and they fill annually some 800,000 positions. Most of these public employment offices are established by state law. In a few states the city governments have taken the initiative, while Ohio and Wisconsin have joint support for their employment offices by both city and state governments. In addition to all these, the various branch offices of the United States Bureau of Immigration have been doing an employment agency business during the last two years. These are almost all located in cities where there are state or municipal employment offices, and the amount of business done has not been great.

Ohio led the way in 1890 with the first American law creating public labor exchanges. The industrial depression a few years later gave some impetus to the movement, but by 1900 there were in existence only the offices in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, Omaha and Superior, in addition to those in the five largest cities of Ohio. Several other offices had been established but were later abandoned; the New York law enacted in 1896 was repealed in 1906. From 1900 to 1910 state laws were enacted in rapid succession and by the end of this period there were about sixty offices located in 19 different states.

Up to this time little attention was given to securing efficient administration of public employment bureaus. The arguments that had secured the establishment of the bureaus were in the main three: (1) Fraud and extortion by private labor agencies; (2) Large numbers of unemployed in the industrial centers; and (3) Lack of farm labor in the agricultural states. On none of these conditions did the public bureaus have any material effect, even after years of operation. Reasons for this failure to accomplish their purposes were not far to seek. Few people knew the principles and methods of properly conducting such offices and no one seemed to care to study the details of their administration in order to find out how to make them successful. The state laws were crudely drawn, and the laws of two or three states with all their imperfections were uncritically copied by the others. Only Massachusetts and the City of Seattle required all the office-force to be civil service appointees while Illinois had a partial merit system. In all other cases political considerations determined appointments. The records and the statistics of almost all the offices would not bear investigation.

New Stage in the Movement.

Beginning about 1910 came a new stage in the movement for public labor exchanges. Since that time Wisconsin, Ohio, and Illinois have amended their laws, reorganized their offices

and adopted new and efficient methods of management. New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California have enacted new laws embodying the most approved principles of administration that recent study and practice have developed, while New York City, Los Angeles, Cal., and several other cities are conducting municipal bureaus along most efficient and progressive lines.

Massachusetts led the way in 1907 with an excellent system of records and an efficient business organization. Wisconsin followed in 1911 adapting these to its own needs and adding an improved method of selecting the office force and a joint committee of employers and workers to advise in the management, and insure neutral conduct between labor and capital. Ohio in 1914 took a further step when, in conjunction with the City of Cleveland, it established special bureaus for juveniles and immigrants in connection with the State-City Labor Exchange. The recent laws enacted in New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California have adopted most of these principles, and civil service appointments have been made the rule in most of the offices. All of this development has brought considerable uniformity of record systems, methods of management and principles of administration in the leading states.

The recent progress toward efficiency and success of public employment offices has been due very largely to an organization of employment bureau officials known as The American Association of Public Employment Offices. This was organized in Chicago in December 1913 and annual meetings have been held since that time. Details of conducting employment bureaus are discussed at these meetings. From the discussions has come a certain concensus of opinion regarding fundamental principles which is gradually finding its way into all the states. Growing directly out of the work of this association has come the organization of the National Farm Labor Exchange with the primary purpose of handling the vast army of harvest hands needed in the grain states of the mid-west. In 1915 the Exchange, which is a co-operative arrangement of the labor and immigration officials of the grain states and the Federal Government, had its first experience in attempting to control the distribution of harvest hands. Not much was accomplished, but the beginning of an effective movement for controlling this great army of labor has been made.

Little headway has been made up to the present toward securing a national system of public labor exchanges. Many bills to accomplish this purpose have been introduced in Congress during the last two sessions, but these bills have not been based on careful investigation of the exact needs

and they have failed to come to a vote. At the present time there is before the house the Nolan bill (H.R. 5783) reported favorably by the Committee on Labor. This bill is better than most of the others, but leaves much to be desired. It creates a Bureau of Employment in the Department of Labor with power to establish employment bureaus throughout the country and to co-operate with the existing state and local bureaus. The relations between the existing offices and those to be established by the United States Government are, however, not definitely worked out, and until this is done there can be no successful national system. The employment work of the U. S. Bureau of Immigration has failed of its purpose primarily because it ignored the existence of local offices and attempted to duplicate their work. The U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations prepared a plan of organization for a National Labor Exchange in the form of a bill which attempted to weld the existing public employment offices into a national system by creating a federal bureau with only supervisory and co-ordinating powers. There were to be no federal local bureaus. But this plan has neither been published nor introduced in Congress. It was indorsed in substance by the American Association of Public Employment Offices.

Meanwhile the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is publishing in its "Monthly Review" statistical reports from public employment bureaus all over the country. This has an excellent effect in leading to uniformity of record-keeping so that comparison and co-operation among the offices may become possible. The American Association of Public Employment Offices has two committees at work, one on a uniform system of record-keeping, the other on a model employment office law, and its annual meetings continue to discuss plans for a National Labor Exchange. In a short time we may expect these plans to take concrete form, and federal action is likely to follow soon afterward.

References.

New York Commission on Employers' Liability and Unemployment, 1911, Appendix III.

Political Science Quarterly, March 1913.
Journal of Political Economy, July 1915.

U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics-Monthly Review, Jan. 1916 to date.

Statistics of Unemployment and Employment Offices-Bulletin 109 U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Proceedings American Association of Public Employment Offices Bulletin U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.