Old-age pensions, or State insurance against old age as well as disability, now exist in several countries, notably Germany, New Zealand, and England. The German law[1] is much the most intelligent and the least communistic in that it provides that half the fund is raised by deductions made from the wages of the workmen themselves. It applies to all persons, male and female, employed under salary or wages as workmen, journeymen, apprentices, or servants; also to all industrial workmen, skilled laborers, clerks, porters, and assistants; also to all other persons whose occupation consists principally in the service of others, such as teachers who do not receive an annual salary of more than five hundred dollars; also to sailors and railway employees; also to domestic servants. No one is obliged to insure himself who is over the age of seventy, and no one is bound to insure who does not work in a required insurance class for more than twelve weeks or fifty days in each year. When women get married, they insist on reimbursement of one half of all the insurance assessments they have paid up to that time, provided such assessments amount to two hundred weeks, or four years--a provision which must very much help out marriages, and from which the amusing deduction may be drawn that the average value of a husband in Germany is considered to be about one-half the expense of supporting his wife for a period of two hundred weeks, or four years. On the other hand, the law has the effect of postponing marriage for the first four years of a woman's employment, as it practically imposes a penalty upon a woman marrying before four years from the time when she begins to pay to the State insurance money. [Footnote 1: U.S. Industrial Commission Reports, vol. V, pp. 228-241.] The English old-age pension law is a mere gratuity in the nature of outdoor relief, giving to everybody who has reached a certain age, without reference to any previous service, tramps or drones as well as workmen. It is a law indefensible in principle and merely the accident of a radical government. It provides that every person over seventy whose yearly means do not exceed thirty-one pounds ten shillings (_i.e._ income from property or privilege) and is not in "regular receipt of poor relief" and has not "habitually failed to work according to his ability, opportunity and need" nor been sentenced to any imprisonment for a criminal offence--all to be determined by a local pension committee with appeal to the central pension authority--shall receive a pension of five shillings a week when his annual means do not exceed twenty-one pounds, that is, thirteen pounds a year, down to one shilling a week when they exceed twenty-eight pounds seventeen shillings six pence.