Washington, June 19.
second time declared unconstitu-The Supreme Court has for the tional an Act of Congress intended to put an end to child labour in the south. The Smployment of young children in southern factories has long been a crying, evil, and in the absence of any strong public sentiment against it in the states in which it is permitted, Congress has endeavoured to cope with it, but so far without success.
The first attempt to suppress it took the form of an act prohibiting the transportation in—interstate commerce of goods manufactured in factories in which children under a certain age were employed. But the Supreme Court declared—the act to be an invasion of the rights of the individual state, it being clearly the intention of Congress to regulate the hours of labour, a purely state function.
The second attempt of Congress to put a stop to the evil took the form of the imposition of a tax of 10 per cent. upon the annual net profits of any manufacturing establishment employing child jabour. This the Supreme Court has likewise declared to be unconstitutional. In the course of a Juminous judgement the Chief Justice, speaking for the entire Court, said that taxation for revenue was clearly not the primary purpose of the act. The Court would be blind, he said, to shut its eyes to the fact that the real purpose was to prohibit the employment of children, and for the Court to assent to it would be to break down the constitutional limitations upon the powers of Congress and completely wipe out the sovereignty of the states.
The decision of the Court has been much criticized from different angles, social reformers and labour unions in particular _in-bulging in strong criticism. But so far as social reformers are con-corned, their criticism was forestalled by the Chief Justice who said that the Court had to do its duty even though it had to refuse to give effect to legislation designed to promote the highest good. And again: "The good sought in unconstitutional legislation is an insidious feature, because it leads citizens and legislators of good purpose to promote it without thought of the serious breach it will make in the ark of our covenant, and in the maintenance of that local self-government on the one hand and. of national power on the other under which the country thas prospered for a century and a half."
Little criticism of the Covrt's decision has been heard in Congress, but our national legislators are rather given to passing the yuck, as the saying is, to the Supreme Court when they want to appease public sentiment and do not know just how to do it. They are just now getting ready to do a similar thing in regard to a bill for the suppression of lynching. That bar-barons custom, after showing some signs of diminution, is once more flourishing, 10 lynchings hav ing occurred in a single state (Texas) within three weeks.
Anti-Lynoaine Brun, The anti-lynching bill imposes a penalty of $10,000 on any county in which a lynching occurs, the money to be paid to the surviving relatives of the victim. The bill, if passed, would be almost certain to be declared unconstitutional as an infringement of the police powers of the state. But in the unlikely contingency of its validity being established, it is the general opinion that it would prove unworkable. The facts: in each case would, of course, have to be established locally, by federal juries drawn from the same class of citizens as have hitherto invariably rendered the punishment of lynchers impossible. It has even been said by a southern senator that in the event of the bill becoming law, the negroes themselves would not be above bringing about the lynching of one of their own number, for the sake of the financial compensation. And more unlikely things have happened.
Usporutarity_ or ConaRess.
In one or two of my recent letters I have had occasion to mention the growing disfavour with which Congress is regarded throughout the country, while President Harding is enjoying undiminished popularity. So far there has been no actual collision between the President and the Legislature, but a clash at no distant date seems inevitable. It will probably occur over either the soldiers' bonus bill or the ship subsidy bill. To the former the President is unalterably opposed unless it should go to him with provision for raising the money—variously estimated at from four to seven billions of dollars—that will be needed to give effect to it without any increase of taxation, jand yet Congress is advancing the bill stage by stage, and there is quite a° possibility that it might even be able to override the President's veto. The bill for the Subsidizing of the merchant' marine the President strongly favours, but Coneress_ is decidedly apathetic about it. and the President has threatened to cal] an extra session if the present regular session should be allowed to come to an end without the passage of the bill.
No direct criticism of Congress has been made by the President, or a rupture would be' inevitable. But speaking at Cleveland, Ohio, on Thursday last, the Secretary of War, one of the ablest and most influential members of the Cabinet, declared that the legislative branch of our government had probably never been at a lower ebb than it is to-day, adding that there was. an almost universal demand that the President take control in legislative matters. This of course brought a bitter attack on Mr. Weeks in both houses, a perfectly natural thing so far as it proceeded from the Democrats, but a very unedifying spectacle as emanating from the Republican leader of the House of Representatives and prominent Republican senators.
Speciatism 1N Mepicat Practice, Under the title "Contemporary Deferrents to the Process of Clinical Medicine," Dr. Sydney R. Miller recently delivered before the American Congress on_ Internal Medicine at Rochester, Minm., a striking presidential address, published in full in "Science" of June 2. address is a difficult. one for a layman to—summarize, but one or two of its leading features may be briefly mentioned. The chief "deterrent" is, in the opinion of Dr. Miller, the -growth of specialism, which, whatever good it may have accomplished, appears to have been productive of some by no means negligible evils. Among them is a lessening of the sense of proportion, as wag pointed out by Osler not long before his death, when. he said that "Specialism has fragmented the specialties themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.'" Another evil, says Dr. Miller, is the development of a class discrimination by which the general practitioner seems to have lost caste. Still another is the inequality of the financial compensation of the specialist and the general practitioner, which contributes to the present inadequate supply of physicians in rural. districts. Finally there is the destruction of those intimate relations between physician and patient that constitute the very essence of the healing art. While he does_not say so in so many words, Dr. Miller evidently regards a too ready recourse to surgery as one of the serious deterrents to the progress of internal medicine, and in this connexion he quotes one of the world's most famous surgeons, Dr. W. J. Mayo, who says that "surgery should ~be put back where it belongs,—a means of mechanical therapy in conjunction with medicine which should not continue in competition with the inter-rust, as it has in the past."
Loxnoy, July 15.—The German Consulate at Petrograd was opened on July 9.—Reuter.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.