A PREITY TYPE-WRITER

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1587, 29 April 1887, Page 3

A PREITY TYPE-WRITER

The prettiest girl in the employ of the United States Government is said to be a copyist at the Navy Department. This is Buying a good deal, as about •1000 women hold positions in Washington, and probably 2UUO more in other parts of tae country are receiving salaries. Some f the " Countesses," as the girls employed in the Treasury Depaittuent are called, are very pretty, but the belle of the Navy beats them all. She is the niece of Mr Phelps, and her family reside at Washington. For about four years the young Jady has been employed as a type-writer in the office of Commodore Walker, the chief of the Bureau of Detail, receiving a Balary of niue hundred dollars a year. She is a dark-eyed blonde, with a beautiful figure, and the officers of the navy are all her devoted slaves. She was so much interrupted in her work by them that Commander M'Calla, in whose room sbe is, was compelled to prohibit the officers from interviewing her in department hours, and got a large screen behind which her attractions aie hidden. If the commander leaves his room for a moment there is sure to be some bold young tar about the building to run in for a chat with the beauty, aud when M'Calla returns the culprit is profuse in his excuses. The number of officers who have typewriting to be done is astonisaing, aud t&ey all want to superintend the work. When the young lady leaves the department at night tnere are usually two or more officers accidentally waiting in the corridors to escort her safely down the elevator and Bee her to the street-car,

SOCIALIST FALLACIES. The Toronto World, discussing the Socialist proposals for State employment, remarks that when, from Utopian generalities and vaguo denunciations of capital and the rich, Socialist leaders come down to practical proposals, they soon give us the measure of their competence to reconstruct society. Mr Hyndman demands, for all men and women out of employment, work on full wages, to be paid by the State, which is also to divide among them the profits of their labour—a minimum of wages to be paid for short hours of work ; and the same wages for women as for men. This, for anyone who has a glimmering of economical science, or even a particle of common sense, is enough. In the first place, what is the State, and where is it to get the funds for paying high wages to an indefinite number of persons without receiving any profit itself? Whence can it get them but by taxing the rest of the community ? What justice is there in taking money, say from a struggling tradesman, or even from a struggling professional man, in order to pay, not only full wages, but profits, to a mechanic whose lack of employment may after all be partly his own fault? It is astonishing how incurably the minds of most men are infected with the fallacious idea of the State as being apart from and above all the persons of whom the community is made up, and possessed not only of superior wisdom and beneficence, but of an inexhaustible stock of money of its own. If such a bonus were held out to lack of employment, whether caused by accident or demerit, what limit does Mr Elyndman suppose there w.mld be to the multitude of the " unemployed ?" Does he not know that national workshops have proved frauds, and that even relief works, on a large scale, have generally bsen little better than waste ? To enact that men shall not bo allowed to work at any below a fixud rate of w&c-es would be simply to enact that a good many of theu should not be allowed to work at all, unless Mr Hyndman means to compel employers to give out work at a loss to themselves ; and this arrangement as Mr Hyndman himself can hardly fail to see, would soon como to an end. The rich cannot be plundered and still remain rich. Besides, to make his legislation w >rk, even for a day, this reformer must constitute himself dictator, not only of British industry, but of tho industrial world; o herwise, the foreigner, being left free both as to wages and as to hours, will at once undersell the products of forced wages and restricted time. The Germans, it seems, choose to work for ton or eleven hours a day, and the English reformer has no moans of preventing them. This is a rock, indeed, upon which all these industrial classes split. In the sa:re manner the reformer, in forbidding women to work for lower wage 3 than men, practically forbids them to work at all, inasmuch as nobody will employ them at the male rate of wages if their labour is worth less than that of men. Worth less than that of men in most departments labour unquestionably is.

If Mr Hyndraan's proposal for the employment of the London poor by the State at wages, in addition to all the profits on their labour, were to be adopted, pauperism would rush into London like a mill-race. The riots by which Mr Hyndman and his confederates are always trying to regenerate society can only make matters worse. They take from work mo.Dy people who have it ; they disturb trade, cause to be shut up, and thereby still further reduce the amount of employment; they repel or paralyse benevolence, which is most actively at work in the poor quarters of the city, and they inspire the unfortunate people with the fatal notion that they can mend their condition by lawlessness, when they can mend it only by industry and thrift. Has there not been enough of streetfighting and barricades in Paris, and are not the consequences of it to the working class there sufficiently manifest ?