Municipal socialization of land values, while manifestly intended to benefit the poorer classes, directly affects all the elements of the city population. Other measures enacted by the Bolsheviki are restricted to the proletariat, and properly belong to the field of specific labor legislation. Thus, a law has been passed limiting the working day in both industrial and commercial establishments to eight hours, and further regulating the work of women and children. Furthermore, a minimum wage of the hired workers has been fixed in each section of the country. But by far the most radical and characteristic innovations launched by the Bolshevist Government in this line of legislation are those relating to compulsory insurance of workmen.
On Dec. 29 there was created the Institute of Insurance Soviets, with an executive organ in the form of a Chamber of Insurance. It is the intention of the Government to introduce compulsory insurance for laborers against sickness, unemployment, invalidism, and accidents. The regulations published so far relate only to the first two forms of insurance. The respective decrees rule that throughout the territory of the Russian Republic all hired workers, without distinction of sex, age, religion, nationality, race, and allegiance, are to be insured against sickness and unemployment, irrespective of the character and duration of their work. Salaried employes and members of liberal professions are not subject to this regulation.
At the moment the workman is hired by the employer he automatically becomes a member of two fraternities. In the event of his illness, one furnishes him free medical aid and a weekly allowance equal to his wages; the other assures him the equivalent of his wages if he loses his employment and becomes an unemployed workman. The latter term the law defines as "any able-bodied person depending for subsistence chiefly upon the wages of his (or her) labor, who is unable to find work at the normal rate of remuneration fixed by the proper trade union, and who is registered in a local labor exchange or trade union." The workmen contribute no dues to the fraternities. The income of the latter consists mainly of the payments made by the employers. The owner of an establishment using hired labor must contribute each week to the health insurance fraternity 10 per cent. of the sum he pays out as wages, and at least 3 per cent. of the same sum to the unemployment insurance fraternity. The administrative machinery of this novel form of insurance is worked out with much detail.
It is natural to ask how the various institutions described above are working, if they are functioning at all. It is clear that the smooth working of a great number of cumbersome and wholly novel administrative agencies in a body politic torn by an unprecedented social upheaval amid the horrors of a twofold war would be little short of a miracle. Moreover, it appears that the Bolsheviki have already grown disappointed in some of their political dogmas, notably in the unrestrained and ubiquitous application of the elective principle. Nevertheless, the query, in its entirety, can hardly be adequately answered at present. The time is not far off, however, when it will be possible to say whether the measures decreed in the name of the dictatorial will of the Russian proletariat have taken root or—and this alternative is more probable—whether they have remained merely codified day-dreams.
Lithuania's Efforts Toward Autonomy
By A. M. Martus
In the press of the United States on May 4, 1918, there appeared a notice that President Wilson had given audience to the Lithuanian delegation, recognizing the Lithuanians as a distinctively separate race having rights of self-determination.
At the time of the upheavals in Russia, during the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, Lithuanians, irrespective of political affiliations, held a convention in their capital, Vilna, over 2,000 delegates participating, where they unanimously asserted their right of self-government; also expressing a strong desire to form one political body with their half-brothers, the Letts.
Again in October, 1917, a convention was held in Vilna with about 250 delegates from those parts of Lithuania occupied by German forces, to press their claim of independence for Lithuania. In January, 1918, representative Lithuanians assembled in the same city proclaimed independent Lithuania. Another convention of Lithuanian representatives from Russia and from Lithuanian communities in the United States, England, and Argentina, held in the same month in Stockholm, Sweden, approved the act of their countrymen under German domination. On March 13 and 14 American Lithuanians held a convention in New York City, giving their unanimous approval to the proclaiming of an Independent Lithuanian Republic; here a unanimous resolution was passed protesting against any Polish aspirations or claims to Lithuania, and demanding the inclusion of the Lithuanian part of East Prussia, with the old Lithuanian city of Karaliauchus (Königsberg,) in the Lithuanian Republic.