So it seems that my fellow “Socialist agitators” and I are leading around by their noses such staid and proper citizens as are to be found in the City Club of New York, the New York Federation of Labor and the American Association for Labor Legislation.[5] And because some of us are advocating here and now in New York that employers shall be permitted self-insurance, mutual insurance or contribution to a state managed fund, we are “seeking to destroy private business in all its forms.” But F. Robertson Jones, who is one of those “employes of the casualty companies who have their bread and butter at stake,” really need not be so perturbed. No one really proposes “to transfer their jobs to political appointees and to leave them out in the cold.” That is a “pure figment of the imagination” to make use of Mr. Jones’ own restrained language. There are many good men working for the state now and there will be more when Mr. Jones and his fellow-employes are taken over to apply to the public good the experience and knowledge gained in private enterprises. And if public service is too contaminating, there will still be the self insurers, and the mutuals in which those left “out in the cold” may find ready employment. Let me hasten to add that I do not make this statement “sneeringly” and that I hope a sober consideration of it will carry conviction that if untrue, at least it is not “unqualifiedly untrue.” One example will do as well as a dozen to illustrate my point about the attitude of the casualty companies toward “elective” acts. It is well known that those companies opposed the New Jersey “elective” act at the start. Seeing its tremendous advantages they then became active in its support. As illustrating this point, I need only refer to the energy and insistence with which the officers and counsel of various casualty companies tried to put through, in the closing days of the session last year in New York, a bill fashioned on the New Jersey model. A special message from the governor and a special session of the Legislature were talked of and only the uncompromising persistence of the State Federation of Labor and the American Association for Labor Legislation saved the employes of this state from something even worse than the New Jersey act. The author of that proposed New York bill, when it emerged from the conference called by certain casualty officials and attorneys disowned it, it was so bad. The Pennsylvania commission is an example of a commission advised by more than casualty company _actuaries_. Of that act a commissioner from another state writes: “The Pennsylvania act is calculated to turn the employe over to the “Shylocks” and loan sharks in the liability business. The report of the Pennsylvania commission outlines the most abominable act that it has been my privilege to examine, and it fully maintains the reputation of the state of Pennsylvania as being the ‘rotten borough’ of the world.”