In dealing with her labor problems Massachusetts maintains a Department of Labor and Industries (1913) which investigates industrial conditions and enforces the labor laws; an Industrial Accident Board (1912) which enforces law compensating injured employes. These two boards together constitute a joint board for the prevention of industrial accidents and diseases. There is also a Board of Conciliation and Arbitration (1886) which mediates and arbitrates industrial disputes, and a Minimum Wage Commission (the first in the country), which investigates the wages of women and minors, and forms boards to recommend scales of wages in low paid industries. Over $200,000 was expended by these boards in 1914.
On encouraging farming and caring for her forests, fisheries, and game, was spent over $600,000 in 1914. This was distributed in many ways, some being in form of bounties to children and youths, to agricultural societies to encourage orcharding, poultry raising, for the purchase of forest lands, the prevention of forest fires, the propagation of wild birds and animals.
Preparedness was not overlooked, over half a million dollars being expended on the militia in 1914. On highways and harbors nearly a million dollars was spent.
Over a million and a quarter dollars was spent on public buildings, the total valuation of state properties being over $8,300,000, the State capitol and land itself being valued at over five and one-half million dollars.
This is the record of Massachusetts. The suffragists have shown wisdom in avoiding reference to these facts. They could not well do otherwise, however, since they are allied with those detestable groups in our midst who are preaching anarchy and revolution as a means to better government. Better government where? This record is one that the men of the State may well be proud of; it is a record that its women will continue to make possible by their non-partisan influence in government, by the training of its future citizens, by the teaching of those lessons of civic honesty and uprightness that make for national integrity as exemplified in the history of our Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
VI
MASSACHUSETTS COMPARED WITH SUFFRAGE STATES
CATHERINE ROBINSON