In this way people who never read the newspapers are given information which they otherwise would probably never receive.
The Legal Aid Society is also at work on a code of laws which will be submitted to the General Assembly at its coming session and which it is hoped will solve the question of loaning money on salaries and chattels in Ohio for all time.
The attorneys of the society promise a law which will set a fixed rate, which will include interest and expenses, on all such loans. It is said now that this rate will be either three or four per cent. The contemplated law will also contain a provision which will make the recovery of usury possible.
It is further planned to have a provision in the law similar to the Massachusetts statute, requiring the signatures of the wife, when a borrower is married, and of his employer. Some of the best attorneys in Cincinnati including former Prosecuting Attorney Benton Oppenheimer, are at work on these laws.
Another movement now on foot is the founding of a salary loan office on the same basis as several chattel loan offices which are now operating in the country, whose stockholders are philanthropists and men of wealth.
Cincinnati has such a chattel loan company and the men who are now fighting the salary loan business there are urging the stockholders of this company to take up the other work.
The most gratifying thing of the Cincinnati campaign has been the falling off of business in the loan offices. The companies admit this and one broker left for Florida after explaining that his business had decreased seventy-five per cent during the campaign.
FOR A COURT OF DOMESTIC RELATIONS
One of the interesting bills to be brought before the 1909 session of the New York Legislature is that drawn by Bernhard Rabbino, relating to a special domestic relations court. Mr. Rabbino believes that if we have courts for the purpose of divorce, for separating mothers from children and children from fathers, we should have a separate tribunal to which families in discord could appeal.
There are probably from 12,000 to 15,000 domestic trouble cases handled yearly in Manhattan and the Bronx alone, but as no records are kept of summons cases,—and these come under that head,—it is not possible to compute the exact number. Probably it is greater than the number of cases handled by the children's court, and a domestic relations court is justified by Mr. Rabbino, additionally, on the ground that it precedes the children's court, having for its fundamental purpose the preservation of the family as a unit, with an opportunity for fathers and mothers to secure the same expert and individual attention that is given to the children.