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.