ill put the ordinary anti-truck
laws--that is, legislation forbidding payment in produce or supplies
or commodities of any kind. Finally, the store-order laws forbidding
payment to be made in orders for indefinite supplies on any particular
store, still less on a store owned or operated by the company or
employer. Such laws have sometimes been held unconstitutional in all
particulars, sometimes when they apply only to certain industries,
as, for instance, mines. In the writer's opinion they are never
constitutional when applied to corporations, nor are they class
legislation when applied to mines, for the reason that it is well
known that mines are situated in remote districts where there are few
stores, and that the maintenance of a company store has not only led
to much cheating but to an actual condition of peonage. That is to
say, the miners would be held in debt and led to believe that they
could not leave the mine or employment until the debt was liquidated.
Belonging usually to the most ignorant class, it is matter of common
knowledge that this has been done, and that Poles, negroes, or others
of the more recent immigrants have been permanently kept in debt to
the company store or by advances or in other ways, as for rent or
board.

(3) Closely allied to such legislation, of course, is the legislation
against factory tenements or dwellings, but there is probably less
real abuse here, and therefore a greater constitutional objection
against laws forbidding houses, especially model houses, to be built
and rented by the employer. Such efforts, unfortunately, have not
usually been popular. Far from helping labor conditions, they seem
to have caused great resentment, as was notably the case in Pullman,
Illinois, and very recently in Ludlow, Massachusetts. It may be that
the American temperament prefers its own house, and resents being
compelled to live in a house, however superior, designed for him and
assigned to him by his employer.

(4) The next matter which has evoked the attention of philanthropists
and the angry resentment of the persons they supposed they were trying
to benefit, is that of the benefit or company insurance or pension
funds. The principle of withholding, or contracting with the employees
to withhold, a small proportion of their wages weekly or monthly to
go into an endowment or benefit fund, even when the company itself
contributes as much or more, was instituted with sanguine hopes some
forty