The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1913-05-10
FROM OTHER PENS
RELIEF FROM Low WAGES.

At best the proposed minimum wage
LOT LOT women workers. IN 1Innols may De
existing social injustice law establish
ing such wage could not be called con-
structive measure based upon the true
lation of the community to its citizens.
The state has done a great wrong to
large and growing group Of its members
girls and women in industrial lfe-in per-
hitting conditions to develop under which
many thousands of them have become
wage earners with absolutely no guidance
or training for their employment. Now,
upon tardy recognition of this wrong, the
state is not unreasonably asked to make
such amends as it can. Since these work
ers have been permitted and often forced,
to go into industrial life, they should at
least be given a living wage.
No employer who uses the service of
girls and women can properly say that
they are not worth enough wages to keep
them alive and fit for work. compul-
sorry living wage may be justified even
after one admits the sad incompetence of
many of those who are to receive the
measure, which is one of temporary and
partial relief, not complete solution of
the problem.
Obviously, however. measures for the
permanent relief of this evil should be
taken up at the same time. The condf-
tons that have choked the industries and
commerce with unskilled, incompetent,
low-priced labor must not be allowed to
continue.
The flooding of the nations places or
business with unframed workmen and
workwomen is the reult of lamentable
shortsightedness on the part of the ma
uons business men and educators. In
fact. it may be said that the solution
would not yet be in sight were 1t not for
the examples of some European countries
which. being older and not so rich in nat
u-al resources, have been confronted ear
lier by the problem in it's acuter stages.
The way to raise wages generally and
permanently is to educate the workers to
be worth more and so to command more
to put within their reach true vocational
observation-disclosures News.
o.
WHO ARE THE INTELLIGENT?
Martin W. Littleton discerns a grave
danger in the exercise of the suffrage by
the plain people regardless of intellectual
qualification Speaking in Boston he de-
plored the success of the Belgian strikers
in abolshing plural voting, which he
called the most intelligent system of
voting ever known" and said: Universal
suffrage is bound to fail unless every man
and woman is educated on how to use the
suffrage with Intelligence" And he cited
HanNlton's opinion that 1.-The government
should be by the intellectual MEM
bers of the community"
But who are the intelligent and by what
standards or processes of inquiry are they
to be defined and sorted from the nom
intelligent? Are they the college edu-
Gated? That qualification would rule out
think much of Lincoln's intelligence and
used to call him "baboon.' What John
Adams thought of Washington's mental
powers is illustrated by the anecdote of
his shaking his fist at a portrait of the
Father of His Country and saying, IF
that wooden headed man had not kept his
mouth shut he would have been found
out"
What is an intelligent voter would be a
more puzzl1ng question than What is
spite of Mr.. Littleton's gloomy forebod-
ings 1t is probable that Belgium will
worry along under universal suffrage. as
this country has done, quite as well as II
voting were restricted to the intel
lectual.'-New York World