Minnesota paid the highest wages for all classes of wage-earners of the first group of states; Iowa paid higher wages to men in 1900 than Wisconsin, but the latter state paid better wages to women and children. Exceptionally high wages, not reached anywhere near by any other state, were paid in Montana, but here was also a notable decrease in women's wages. The same was the case in South Dakota, and for

North Dakota a decrease in children's wages was shown.

A study of Table VIII will gain in interest if taken up in connection with Table V, which shows the number of wage-earners of each class in specified industries. Some of the average weekly wages for children, which are shown in the exhibit, will go a long way in support of the assertion that child labor is not desirable and is harmful to the child itself and also to the interests of adult wage-earners.

JULIUS MOErsch.

ST. PAUL, MINN.

ARTS AND CRAFTS.

THE primary motive of the arts and crafts movement is, as the name implies, the association of art and labor. Initially an English movement, it has been slowly emerging from the general industrial field for about forty years. On its theoretical side the movement is, of course, much older than forty years, its development as an idea being measured by the lives of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris.'

The chapters which make up the greater part of Mr. Triggs's volume give an excellent outline of the work of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris in relation to art and industry, followed by a sketch on Ashbee and the Reconstructed Workshop and another on Rookwood. The whole leads up to the practical efforts made in Chicago by the Industrial Art League, of which the author is secretary.

Little need be said here of the facile and engaging manner in which Mr. Triggs presents his plea for the work of regeneration in which the league is engaged, but it may not be out of place to speak of the economic bearing of such a movement as a departure in industrial aims and methods. The purpose is to humanize and beautify industry and to bring art into the everyday work of the industrial classes. This end is sought through a return to handicraft methods of work and an avoidance of competitive commercial methods of management. In the later phases of the propaganda machine production is not condemned without qualification, except in practice. Particularly is this true of Mr. Trigg's presentation of the case, although the earlier phases represented by Morris, and more especially by Ruskin, renounce the machine and all its works with an animation that is not to be mistaken. But even in the later phases of the movement the recognition of machine production as an unavoidable circumstance, if not indeed an unavoidable evil, is a perfunctory concession to facts rather than an integral element in the principles on which the advocates of the movement go about their work.

The movement, it must be said, runs on sentimental grounds rather than on grounds of reasoned practicability. Industrially it is not a continued growth out of the present, but seeks continuity with a past phase of economic life. This may be a necessity of the case. To find a basis for that "association of art and labor" at which the movement aims, such may perhaps be the only available recourse, and this is Chapters in the History of the Arts and Crafts Movement. By OSCAR LOVELL TRIGGS. Chicago, 1902. Published by the Bohemian Guild of the Industrial Art League.

scarcely the place to offer criticism on the artistic merits of such a course. But seen from the standpoint of industrial feasibility the whole matter looks somewhat different. Its striking trait in this respect is a certain "lack of contemporaneity." Modern industry, in so far as it is characteristically modern, means the machine process; but according to the arts-and-crafts apprehension, only outside the machine process is there salvation. Since the machine process is indispensable to modern culture, both on business grounds and for reasons of economy, this limits the immediate scope of the arts-and-crafts salvation to those higher levels of consumption where exigencies of business and economy are not decisive. The greater (90-99 per cent. of the whole) range of industry must under present circumstances of business and household management remain untouched by any such proposed alteration of the character of the industrial process. The "industrial art" methods are too costly for general business purposes, and the "industrial art" products are (in point of fact) too expensive for general consumption; indeed it is of the essence of industrial art products, if they are to pass inspection by the adepts, that they must be sufficiently expensive to preclude their use by the vulgar.

Culturally the movement is an offshoot of Romanticism, which means archaism, but always a sophisticated archaism. In the arts-andcrafts ritual the requisite sophistication is had by an insistence on genuiness, sincerity; which being interpreted in economic terms means a genuinely high labor cost. This requirement, of course, boldly traverses the requirements of modern business enterprise as well as of modern, that is to say democratic, culture. Business exigiencies demand spurious goods, in the sense that the goods must cost less than they appear to; while a democratic culture requires low cost and a large, thoroughly standardized output of goods.

If the proposed association of art and labor is to go into effect under modern circumstances, it will have to mean the association of art with the machine process and with the technology of that process. Modern industry is machine industry, and the forms of labor for which there is an outlook under modern circumstances are those employments which are engaged in the machine industry. Such labor as is not associated with the machine process and conditioned by its technological requirements is in the position of an inconsequential interloper. Such work as goes on today without being immediately under the guidance of the mechanical technology, is, with sporadic exceptions, subsidiary to that main body of work which this technology directly