The compensation to workmen for accident seems at first sight a righteous charge upon capital for the benefit of those who are injured in their business. The immediate effect upon character is to save the careless, thoughtless, and incompetent from the results of their faults; this at once reduces largely the weeding and educational effects of the bad qualities. No man would ever have become careful if he did not find the necessity of being so. Even if a tendency to malingering can be avoided, yet the teaching effect is done away. It may be thought that it is better to save the individual from his indiscretions rather than cure the race. Like most sentimentalism it causes more misery in the long run. Another, and entirely separate, effect is to prevent the employment of those who by age or bodily defect are the more liable to accident; the immediate hardship of loss of employment to these classes is, in the total, probably greater than the hardship of loss of employment by accidents which it is sought to compensate. We injure the individual as well as the race by such grandmothering. A severe law demanding full and adequate protection of workers, where they can be mechanically protected, is the utmost that could be beneficially enforced. The provision of old age pensions is another pleasing scheme. In the first place it will diminish the need of foresight and of self-restraint; it will thus weaken character by removing the great driving force of self-interest. The burden will have to be borne by all, including those who are already at the last gasp, and will tend to push such over the border line. It will not discriminate between those who have borne a large share in the cost of national renewal by bringing up a family, and those who have selfishly squandered all they received. And like outdoor poor relief, it will be discounted in wages, and tend to lower the wage rate if no savings are to be expected. A sounder plan would be to revert to the kind of communal system of our forefathers, and make a legal demand for a pension of, say, £2 a year from every child, and 10_s._ a year from every grown up nephew or grandchild. Thus those who have done most for the State by renewal would receive most in return, and the greatest inducement would be given to bring up children to active and capable lives. The idea of a right to maintenance would be the knell of any State which undertook it. The endowment of wastrels, the taxing of all the capable for the propagation of the incapable, and the wholesale deterioration of character, would be utter ruin to a nation. Nature knows of no right to maintenance, but only the necessity of getting rid of those who need it by mending or ending them.