lions of barrels of oil lying two thousand feet below the surface on the public domain, and Heaven only knows how many cubic feet of gas, in precisely the same condition. The application of a rational system of leases and royalties, however, will make all these treasures part of our practical life.

THE INCOME TAX STANDS

T

HE recent decision by the court of last resort, upholding the constitutionality of the income tax against five attacks on it, verified, in its proper sense, Mr. Dooley's witty maxim that "the Supreme Court follows the election returns." In a large sense, that is what it ought to do. In a democracy, what the people want, after thoughtful deliberation, ought to be affirmed by that court as being the law of the land. And the people will take this decisionon the income tax as an affirmation of their fifty-year struggle to maintain the principle of a direct tax on incomes. They will take it so, notwithstanding that, technically, it is simply the upholding of the particular methods by which that tax shall be determined under a particular statute enacted by Congress.

And in this the public will be fundamentally right. The men who fought these last five attacks on this last form of the law to the last legal ditch were probably quite sincere in their special reasons for complaint, but the broad truth remains that most of these attacks in the last fifty years have been intended really to prevent the taxing of incomes at all. The people intended to settle that question for good when they forced the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment three years ago. They would probably be willing to admit that the Congressional Act which put that amendment into operation may be defective. If so, Congress should be the source of relief: Congress should be asked or compelled to pass a better law. But attacks on the law through the courts, and on technical grounds, are resented as efforts to evade the principle of the tax itself.

The food upon which public enthusiasm for the income tax has fed has been the

conviction that wealth has evaded its share of taxation under other methods of collection. Landlords pass the tax on real estate on to the public in the form of increased rents; capitalists manage to avoid much of the tax on personal property; the internal revenue taxes are shifted to the consumer in the increased price of tobacco and spirits; and not only the customs taxes have been paid by the general public but a generous profit besides, because the tariff has prevented the importation of foreign goods at even an advance on competitive prices.

II

In

But, though resentment at these evils chiefly prompted the public to favor the income tax, one of the most valuable positive virtues of that tax is often overlooked. This virtue lies in the fact that the income tax is a direct tax. The man who pays it knows he is paying it. The strong arm of the Government itself reaches out directly to him and takes from his hand a part of his money. stinctively he feels like calling this action highway robbery. So much the better. For when a man feels that way, he is likely to take a keen interest in the way the "robber" spends his money. If the Government that takes his money proceeds to spend it in pork barrel appropriations, instead of for wise and considered purposes, he is likely to regard it as a personal injury and make a disturbance about it-as he ought. Probably no one thing would so safeguard the public treasury as some form of direct collection of all taxes.

Such direct collection of taxes serves another useful purpose: it brings home to the citizen the personal realization that he has a stake in the Governmentpersonal duties to it as well as personal benefits from it. Almost every point at which the Government touches the life of the citizen serves only to remind him of its beneficence. The postman bringing a letter to the door is almost the only living symbol of Federal unity that the average citizen ever sees. To be sharply reminded, by way of his pocket-book, that beneficence costs money, his money, leads to a sense of personal duty to the common

wealth. This is peculiarly important when such questions as national defense arise. Instinctively, the American thinks that "the Government will take care of that." But armies are not made of Government officers: modern armies cannot be made even of Government-paid men. They are made of the citizenry of the Nation-you and me and our neighbors. Direct taxes help to make us realize our personal obligation in the defense of the country-our country.

MISFITS PHYSICAL AND MENTAL

W

HAT shall be done with invalid employees? As invalid employees are the large majority of all workers, this question covers comprehensive ground. Not all employees have tuberculosis, valvular heart disease, or acute infections; nearly all, however, have some physical defect that interferes with efficiency and happy living. Most never suspect the real situation and yet a careful examination, made periodically, will detect weaknesses that may hasten their end.

A great manufacturing company in New York has a regular and systematic method of protecting its employees' health. Its records show how haphazard is the usual scheme of managing a great industrial plant. Ideally, the organization should seek out the man best fitted to do that particular job and set him to doing it. Yet this company found many absurdities. It had telephone operators with defective hearing and men and women doing close work, demanding the keenest vision, who had serious defects of eyesight. Laborers who were ruptured or afflicted with heart disease were performing heavy lifting work. A man whose work made him climb ladders almost continuously had heart disease and a high blood pressure. Another worthy citizen with a frightfully high blood pressure was doing especially heavy work and rapidly eating himself to death. These discoveries led to a general shifting; these people were not discharged, but they received medical attention and were placed in positions where they could render some service to the company.

This question of locating misfits is one of the greatest problems of modern industrialism. Medical departments can accomplish a great deal. Such a department in one concern now examines every candidate for employment as rigidly as would a life insurance company. They do not demand physical perfection, but at least there is some assurance that the man fitted for his work. They also examine every employee periodically, advise the slightly incapacitated how they can im prove their defects, and take all measures. even at the cost of long vacations and medical attendance, to revitalize the more seriously ill. Beyond this physical work. however, few corporations have yet gone. But the mental misfits are probably more common than the physically misplaced. Men and women in thousands are doing work for which they are unfitted-men and women who, if some method could be found of discovering their aptitudes, would have useful careers. A recent investigation disclosed that several corporations that jointly employ 10,000 people had engaged 40,000 employees in a single year. This meant that 30,000 had failed. Yet we cannot believe that the human scrap heap is as large as this. There must have been something that the majority could do. Surely there must be some other method than that of "hiring and firing" to assort the human material that is used in industry.

S

STATE POLICE

OME ONE once asked a chief of the Texas Rangers to explain the remarkable exploits of his men in arresting desperate desperate criminals singlehanded. His reply was: "A man that knows he is in the wrong can't stand up against a man that knows he is in the right-and keeps on coming."

That is one of the chief merits of all state police, whether they be Texas Rangers, Northwest Mounted Police, or the State Constabulary of Pennsylvania They are trained to "keep on coming They have the soldier's disciplined mind that has thought out the perils of his calling and has come to take the risks of his

business as a matter of course. They have, besides, the soldier's impersonal attitude toward the man he may be called on to shoot. Where a militiaman on riot duty may waver at the thought of using force against his next-door neighbor, or where a sheriff or constable may hesitate to act for fear of political consequence, a state policeman has no such doubts. He is trained to restrain himself to the last instant to which quiet determination is safe, and then to shoot and shoot to kill. This aloofness and this certainty of action in themselves almost guarantee that he shall not have to shoot. In the nine years that the Pennsylvania Constabulary has kept order in that state, the number of times its men have had to use their weapons is relatively very small, and the deadly effectiveness with which they did use them when they had to has made it possible, for example, for six men to quell a riot of more than a thousand strikers and sympathizers in Pottsville by simply riding slowly and silently through the streets.

The temptation to abuse their authority is very small for a body of men that have so large a territory to patrol, whose military discipline keeps them from forming strong local attachments, and whose political supervision rests in a distant state capitol instead of in a near-by courthouse or city hall. Probably no more effective method of safeguarding the rural districts of a state has yet been devised. Riot duty in cities is the more familiar, because the more spectacular, part of the work of a state police; but its most useful, and by far its larger, work is the protection of the lonely countryside in which sheriffs and constables alike have been conspicuously ineffective.

accumulating enormous liabilities for pensions. Interest on England's war debt, as it stands at present, will require an annual charge of about $500,000,000. In addition to this, pension charges already demand $100,000,000 a year. That is the amount provided for in the latest English budget. No one can foresee what appropriations will be needed in the next ten, twenty, or fifty years. In 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, we were paying $15,000,000 a year to its survivors. Now, fifty years afterward, the cost is $166,000,000 yearly. If England increases her pensions at the same rate, she will pay in 1966, about $1,100,000,000 every year on this one item.

Meanwhile Canadians are demanding better pension treatment for their soldiers. Compared with Europe, Canada treats her army with even greater lavishness than the United States. The private soldier gets $1.10 a day and his wife or widowed mother has a separation allowance of $20 a month. Under the Canadian pension system, the rank and file soldier, in case of injury, gets an amount ranging from $75 to $264 a year, a captain from $216 to $720 a year, and a brigadier-general from $636 to $2,100. Canadian newspapers are already denouncing these stipends as niggardly and are pointing to the American pension list as the only respectable model. Thus the Toronto Daily News "would like to see pensions to the rank and file increased. The Dominion is rich enough to provide handsomely for its disabled and partly disabled officers and men." No Canadian statesmen have yet advocated pensions on any other ground than disability; nothing like the American service pension has yet been proposed. But the war is not over yet-these things are in the future. It was not until 1907, forty-two years after the Civil War ended, that our service law was passed by Congress.

In all likelihood the war will deprive the United States of its present preëminence in pensioning soldiers. We shall probably be just getting rid of this burden.

that is, unless we have some new wars— as Europe is feeling the weight most oppressively. If we add England's

$60,000,000 old age pensions to her $100,000,000 military bill the English pension list is now about the size of ours.

THE MORMONS OF MEXICO

UR recent Mexican difficulties have disclosed one picturesque footnote to American history. Most Americans have now learned, for the first time, that there are large Mormon colonies in Mexico.

There are Mormon colonies in Canada also, and the province of Alberta contains two "Stakes of Zion." But to the Mormons all over the world their Mexican colonies are things exceedingly precious. The sacrilegious Mexicans, in assailing them, assail what are, in many respects, the brightest jewels in the Mormon crown. There are Mormons in England, Denmark, Germany, even in New York City, but none fill the peculiar place set aside for the Mormons of Mexico. For these Mexican colonies are "cities of refuge." They are really shrines established for the uninterrupted practice of polygamy. They were founded, in the early 'eighties, primarily as protests against the treatment that the Mormons were receiving in the United States at that time. Then the United States, after temporizing with the Mormons and their peculiar institution for more than half a century, began to enforce vigorously American marriage laws in Utah. President Cleveland, after vainly attempting to persuade the Mormons to become, as he expressed it, "like the rest of us," sent United States marshals and Federal judges into Utah. As Utah was then a territory, Congress possessed jurisdiction over the marriage relation, and the laws of Congress strictly limited the Saints, like the rest of Americans, to one wife. Hunting polygamous Mormons, arresting them, and confining them in the Utah penitentiary became an exciting industry. The polygamists scattered to the four winds of Heaven; Joseph F. Smith, the present head of the church, took refuge in the Hawaiian Islands, while others less important concealed themselves in caves, in abandoned houses, sometimes between the mattresses

in beds. In a few years nearly all the leaders of Mormondom were wearin: stripes in jail, the church property hac been escheated to the United States on the ground that the institution was treasonab and law-defying, and the whole organization, now extremely rich, went bankrupt This was the situation that produced the famous Woodruff manifesto of 1890, by which the Mormon church promised to abandon polygamy in the United States

However, many polygamous Saints had fled to Mexico. The land seemed inviting President Diaz, who was approached on the subject, had no particular hostility to polygamy. He wanted good colonists and the Mormons understood sheep herding and grazing. Here, then, in northern Chihuahua and Sonora, was the place where the Mormons could "live their religion" and keep alive by practice the great doctrine by which the Mormon church rises or falls. The Mexican Mormon colonies have thus been perpetually lighted vestal fires of this "new and everlasting covenant" of polygamy.

In fact, ever since they acquired statehood, the Mormons have secretly prac tised polygamy in Utah. But in Mexico they have practised it openly. These places are as obviously polygamous as was Salt Lake City in the days of Brigham Young. The Mexican colonies have promoted polygamy in the United States, for here the Saints have frequently gone to marry the plural wives they have afterward taken back to Utah. This is the curious story of the origin of the colonies which Villa's forces attacked.

REPRINTS OF FINANCIAL
ARTICLES

HE WORLD'S WORK several years
ago felt compelled to make a

rule forbidding the reprinting of its regular monthly article on investments except by newspapers and other current periodicals. Notwithstanding this rule, unauthorized reprints have been made, without permission, by unknown private agencies. All such reprints are circulated without the consent or sanction of this magazine.

W

HEN in doubt buy municipal bonds," is an old investment rule of thumb which experience has shown to be most widely practised at times when the doubt concerns the country's business and financial outlook. If one runs over the history of the several periods of general depression that have occurred in the United States during the last twenty-five years, one finds that, at the very first signs of uneasiness, the flow of investment capital immediately sets against securities dependent in any way upon the earnings of private enterprise, and in favor of those backed by taxes, the kind of earnings that do not fail.

This tendency distinguished the investment market of 1915. It was especially marked during the first half of the year while the business of the country was going through the uncertain process of readjusting itself to the unprecedented conditions created by the war. It continued as an influence to be seriously reckoned with by the investment bankers, even after this readjustment appeared to have been accomplished and industry of nearly every kind had been stimulated to prosperity proportions. Its importance is pretty definitely suggested by recently published figures, showing that while the railroad, industrial, and public utility corporations had to content themselves with about twenty-five millions less new capital than in 1914, the municipalities of the country were able to command from investors more than forty millions more. In fact, the total amount of permanent municipal loans placed during 1915 was larger than in any other year of the last decade. One authority places it at approximately $489,000,000.

There is something more or less axiomatic about the rule whose operation is thus exemplified. An income from

taxes! Paradoxical as such a thing may seem to those who are unacquainted with securities, it is the most widely accepted formula for safety in the investment world. Yet in undertaking to apply it, investors are not infrequently led into unexpected perplexities.

One who wrote to the WORLD'S WORK not long ago presented a typical case of this kind. He had been charged with the responsibility of investing a small sum of money for a nephew, recently left an orphan. The principal of the investment was to remain undisturbed until the boy became of age, but it would be necessary to use the income meanwhile to help toward his support. In fact, the circumstances made the question of the investment's yield of considerable importance.

The writer said that his own investment experience had been confined to the purchase of a few railroad bonds, none of which could be sold in the market for anywhere near the prices he had paid. He said that although this gave him little concern about the safety of his own funds, he did not like to contemplate the possibility of having to face a similar situation when the time should come to turn the money over to his nephew. What he wanted for the present purpose was an investment free from the vicissitudes of active market securities, yet one which could be converted into cash with reasonable facility and without undue sacrifice, even at a time of uncertainty.

He had first taken the matter up with the cashier of his bank, who had argued convincingly that municipals were the only securities meeting such requirements, and who had advised dividing the money among the following bonds: street improvement 4's of a large city in Ohio to yield 4.05 per cent.; municipal improvement 4's of a California city to yield 4.30 per cent.; the 5's of a school district in