Part 36 (2/2)

(_b_) By securing to every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.

(_c_) By securing a more effective inspection of workshops and factories.

(_d_) By forbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age.

(_e_) By forbidding the interstate transportation of the products of child labor, of convict labor and of all uninspected factories.

(_f_) By abolis.h.i.+ng official charity and subst.i.tuting in its place compulsory insurance against unemployment, illness, accidents, invalidism, old age, and death.

POLITICAL DEMANDS

8. The extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the amount of the bequests and to nearness of kin.

9. A graduated income tax.

10. Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women, and we pledge ourselves to engage in an active campaign in that direction.

11. The initiative and referendum, proportional representation and the right of recall.

12. The abolition of the Senate.

13. The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pa.s.s upon the const.i.tutionality of legislation enacted by Congress. National laws to be repealed or abrogated only by act of Congress or by a referendum of the whole people.

14. That the const.i.tution be made amendable by majority vote.

15. The enactment of further measures for general education and for the conservation of health. The Bureau of Education to be made a department. The creation of a Department of Public Health.

16. The separation of the present Bureau of Labor from the Department of Commerce and Labor, and the establishment of a Department of Labor.

17. That all judges be elected by the people for short terms, and that the power to issue injunctions shall be curbed by immediate legislation.

18. The free administration of justice.

Such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole powers of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of industry, and thus come to their rightful inheritance.

FOOTNOTES:

[229] By a referendum vote of the entire members.h.i.+p of the Socialist party in 1909 these three words, ”and all land,” were stricken out of the Socialist platform.

II

DR. L. EMMETT HOLT

All who practice medicine among children and who study the question of infant mortality statistically are struck with the marked contrast between the death rate of the children of the poor and those of the rich. Clay estimates that in England in the aristocratic families the mortality of the first year is 10 per cent; in the middle cla.s.s, 21 per cent; in the laboring cla.s.ses, 32 per cent. This difference in the infant mortality of the various cla.s.ses is most striking in the case of acute intestinal disease. Halle states that of 170 deaths from this cause investigated in Graz in 1903 and 1904 there were 161 among the poor, 9 among the well-to-do, and none among the rich. It may not be true in adult life, but _in infancy money may purchase not only health, it may purchase life_, since it puts at the disposal of the infant the utmost resources of science, the best advice, the best food and the best surroundings for the individual child. To relieve, or even greatly to diminish, infant mortality these basal conditions of modern city life--poverty and ignorance--must be attacked.

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