The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-04-04

summer. am confident that al, least those manufacturers-and they were
 many-who visited the exhibition here will not pooh-pooh anything because it comes from Germany Indeed, eonsid-
 ering that the Dusseldorf workshops, as
 I have seen with my own eyes, are at this moment filled with things, great and small, being made for every impor- tant industrial center in Great Britain including the shafting for the Man. chester Corporation Electrical works little humility in regard to German products may fairly be demanded from all sections of the British manufaetur- ing community, from workmen not less than from employers The system of labor registries is a German product which concerns them both, not only on occasions of emergency, but at all times,, though it is naturally most val uable to employers when, work is abun- dant and workers scarce, and to f. the employed under the opposite conditions.
 There is the more reason why it should succeed in England in that the superior existing organization both of men. and IIldSlSIS HUT working it than they possess in Germa. ny.
 The principle is simple and familiar; it is that of a Labor Exchange, through which those who want to sell and those who want to buy labor can make their wants mutually known Its success in practice obviously depends on the com- IL 70 ox,s. degree to which standardization is car ried. The wider the area covered and the greater the number. of places brought into communication by a central office the more effective the working. The ideal would be univer- sal system with one head office and branch local centres. Here in Germany they labor under the disadvantage of having begun in a small way and in widely separated localities Stuttgart led the way good many years ago, and was followed by Dresden and Ber- lin The Rhine province, Westphalia, and other districts came in later. Be- ginning in this way with separate To- cal efforts, they have hal to work from without inwards towards centralization, instead of working outwards from a single head-center. The consequence Is that the system, though it has grown and developed, remains very ineom-
 plete. It still consists of a number of intercommunication between towns in
 the same district but without anything like general organization. In this
 Rhine province; for instance, where the
 depression is acute, there is union
 embracing Dusseldorf, Essen, Fiber field, Crefeld and other towns, which, to some extent, work together for pur-
 poses of labor exchange; but they
 have no machinery for exchange with
 the labor markets of Berlin, Saxony or
 Stuttgart There is some prospect of
 obtaining the framework for a more
 complete system from the Industrial
 Courts of Arbitration, in which an
 equal number of employers and en-
 ployed sit as assessors with judge,
 This scheme embodies the principle of
 equal representation of labor and cap
 ital, and has had a marked success in
 Frankfurt, but it is only in an elemen-
 tary stage. On the other hand the con-
 duct of labor exchanges by the local
 authority, which has been adopted in
 some towns, is said to produce disap-
 pointing results. In spite of these de-
 fects the German labor registers do an
 amount of practical work which de-
 serves attention. In the year 1901 they
 obtained situations for l366, ,474 persons in
 saa rcf of work or nearly onp-hH1f of
 those who registered. I have not the figures for the whole country in 1902,