In the case of temporary benefit payments, medical and pharmaceutical aid, and funeral expenses the law gives the victim, his creditors, or his legal representatives a preferred claim on the property of the employers.

In the case of permanent incapacity or death, where pensions are paid to the victims or their heirs, respectively, the State guarantees the payments. That is, if the employer or the company through which he has contracted insurance fails to pay the pensions due, such pensions will be paid by the National Old-age Retirement Fund. To meet this obligation a special machinery has been created by the act of 1898, which is known as the Guarantee Fund. Into this fund all employers covered by the provisions of the law must make payment, and from this fund compensation is paid to all claimants who are unable to collect such compensation.

The amount of contributions required by the law differs for several groups of employers. The original act of 1898 established a surtax of 4 per cent upon the amount of the industrial tax upon all industrial establishments (impôt des patentes), while in the case of mining property an entirely different basis was taken and the taxes are 5 centimes (0.965 of 1 cent) per hectar (2.47 acres) of mining property. The law provided further for subsequent revisions of this rate if it should be found necessary. These rates were originally prepared by means of a study of bankruptcies in French industry.

When the law was extended to cover commercial establishments, by the act of April 12, 1906, it became evident that some of these establishments which are subject to the industrial tax would be charged out of proportion to their trade risk if the same surtax were to be levied upon them as upon the purely industrial establishments. Therefore the surtax in commercial establishments paying the industrial tax was reduced to 14 per cent. The majority of commercial establishments do not pay the industrial tax at all, and for these a third system of contribution to the Guarantee Fund was created, namely, an additional charge upon the accident insurance premium. A subsequent decree of January 30, 1907, fixed this charge upon the accident premium as 2 per cent; still the system did not appear complete, because some of the commercial establishments which would not carry any accident insurance would thus be relieved of the payment of contributions to the Guarantee Fund. The criticism of the methods of payment to this fund was made that employers carrying accident insurance and employers not carrying such contribute to it an equal amount, though the protection of the Guarantee Fund is needed much more by the employees of the latter. In the case of commercial establishments, however, this seeming injustice would appear still greater, as only those employers who carry accident

insurance would contribute to the fund. Therefore, in order to cover the noninsured employers, the law of April 12, 1906, provides that whenever an uninsured employer meets a judgment for a pension he is to contribute a certain percentage of the amount of this judgment to the Guarantee Fund, and this percentage, by the decree of January 30, 1907, has been placed at 4 per cent.

The large accumulations in the Guarantee Fund, due to the excess of the revenues over the claims upon it, influenced the National Assembly to make a further change in the method of taxing establishments for the benefit of this fund. A bill to that effect was introduced in November, 1908, and became a law on May 29, 1909. The legal rates were left undisturbed, but the law prescribes that a modifying coefficient of these rates be announced each year, such coefficient to be computed by a division of expenses by revenue for the last year for which the data are available, so that automatically the coefficient would decline when the proportion of expenses to revenues declined. Such an adjustment will in the future somewhat counteract the tendency toward accumulation of a large fund, which in the final analysis simply means an overcharging of the industry as a whole for this purpose. For the first two years of this application, namely, for 1910 and 1911, this principle was somewhat modified by the provision that the coefficient obtained as above be increased by 20 per cent. This evidently was due to the fear that the reduction of the special guarantee tax might be too great. To illustrate the workings of the new law the computation for 1910 may here be given. The coefficient for 1910 was announced before June 1, 1909, as required by the law, and was based upon the accounts of the fund for 1908.

In 1908 the expenses were 1,306,346.57 francs ($252,125), while the revenues were 2,240,376.13 francs ($432,393). The coefficient obtained by division is .583092. The computed tax rate for 1910 would therefore be for industrial establishments, 4 centimes X .583092, equal to 2.332368 centimes per one franc of payments; for mines, 5 centimes x .583092, equal to 2.915,460 centimes per hectare (2.47 acres) of mining property; and for commercial establishments paying the industrial tax, 1 centimes .583092, equal to .874638 centimes per one franc of industrial payments. For 1910 these computed tax rates must, according to the law of May 29, 1910, be increased by 20 per cent, which makes the actual rate for this year as follows: For industrial establishments, 2.79884 centimes; for commercial establishments, 1.049565 centimes; and for mines, 3.49855 centimes.

Thus the reduction from the original rates does not appear very great for 1910, but when the additional 20 per cent is discontinued after 1910 the difference between the original tax and the actual

tax will appear much greater, and the method provided in 1909 will serve as an automatic check upon the excessive growth of the Guarantee Fund. On the other hand, if the receipts should fall behind the expenditures, the same rule would automatically correct a possible deficit.

RULES FOR OPERATION OF THE FUND.

The methods of payment of compensation by the Guarantee Fund are regulated by the first of the three administrative decrees, issued on February 28, 1899. According to these decress an application may be made only after a judgment has been issued by a court of record. If for any reason the claimant is unable to receive the amount of judgment in cases either of death or of permanent disability, he must make a declaration to that effect to the mayor of the community in which he resides, attaching to this declaration all necessary documents, and this declaration, with the documents, is transmitted by the mayor to the office of the Caisse des depôts et consignations. (The act intrusts the management of the Guarantee Fund to the old-age retirement fund, but as this latter fund is managed by the above-mentioned Caisse, the decree places upon the latter all the administrative functions in connection with the Guarantee Fund.) Within 48 hours after the receipt of this declaration from the mayor the director of the Caisse requests the local justice of the peace to summon the employer or the insurer liable for the compensation. If the latter does not contest the claim or its amount, he must immediately settle the amount or prove within 48 hours that he has transmitted the amount due to the claimant. If he can show that he is unable at the time to meet the payment, the justice of the peace may grant an extension of 30 days within which the payment must be made. If, however, the latter does contest the claim, or its amount, or does not appear at all, such actions must be made matter of record, and within two days after the case is closed in one way or the other the justice of the peace transmits all the documents to the director of the Caisse, who may order payment of compensation from the Guarantee Fund if the claim seems to him. sufficiently well established.

The payment of a claim by the Guarantee Fund does not necessarily mean that this amount is a loss to the fund, because one of the purposes of the fund is to relieve the claimant of the distress incumbent upon excessive delay, and in such cases the fund may be reimbursed subsequently. In fact, the same decree of February 28, 1899, prescribes conditions under which the Guarantee Fund may proceed to recover the amounts paid out from the person or institution responsible for such amounts.

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CONCLUSION.-As indicated above there are several agencies utilized in the enforcement of the workmen's compensation law, such as the National Old-age Retirement Fund, which insures the payment of pensions against defaulting employers and also serves as a means of enabling the employers to transfer the burden of the pension payments; the guarantee fund which is supported by special taxes and which supplies to the National Old-age Retirement Fund the means for paying the pensions due from defaulting employers and for prosecuting the latter; insurance companies, mutual aid societies, and guarantee associations, which assume the risk which the law places upon the employer. All of these agencies are made the subjects of minute administrative regulations, which define their duties, powers, and limitations.

STATISTICS OF THE OPERATION OF THE LAW OF APRIL 9, 1898.

It has been pointed out by experts as a serious drawback of the French system of voluntary insurance as against the German or Austrian compulsory insurance systems that the voluntary system offers great obstacles to the organization of a complete and detailed statistical service in connection with the recording of the accidents as well as their compensation. The criticism seems to be well based in the case of the French statistics of accidents and of the application of the law, which, as will appear presently, notwithstanding the multiplicity of sources, fail to give the necessary information on a great many important questions. This is to be regretted, because such statistical data are not only desirable for the purposes of scientific study of accidents but also absolutely necessary for the proper determination of the trade risk and the careful elaboration of accident insurance rates.

The workmen's compensation law of April 9, 1898, makes provisions for the collection of such statistics as are needed in a study of the practical workings of the law. These include statistics of accidents, of cases that have required judicial action, of the operations of insurance and guaranty institutions that are to assume employers' risks under the law, and statistics of the operations of state insurance organizations whose functions come within the scope of the law. These statistics are all published periodically in various reports. On the one hand, the Labor Office (Direction du Travail) annually publishes the returns concerning accidents reported through the service of factory inspectors. This must be supplemented by the returns of the mine inspectors concerning mining accidents. On the other hand, the office of Social Insurance (Direction de L'assurance et de la Prévoyance Sociales) publishes data concerning the pensions granted, which evi

dently embraces only accidents resulting in death or permanent disability. These two sources are not comparable because they do not cover the same classes of accidents. Moreover, the first source disregards the question of compensation while the second source does not cover the entire application of the law, as it leaves out temporary disability. The total cost of compensation therefore remains undetermined. The second group of annual statistical reports does cover the activity of the various insurance institutions, but as insurance is not compulsory these do not include all the accidents covered by the law and compensated. Furthermore, these reports of insurance institutions are limited to the financial operations only.

In view of these conditions the statistical treatment of accident compensation and accident insurance in France is necessarily somewhat fragmentary. The statistics of accidents based upon the reports of the factory inspectors are studied in detail in a separate section (see p. 774). All available statistical information concerning the application of the law which is considered of value is presented herewith.

ACCIDENTS COMPENSATED.

For the reasons stated above complete data concerning the number of accidents compensated are not available, as the statistics of the operations of law includes only grave accidents, i. e., those leading to death or to permanent disability, whether total or partial.

Since the number of cases privately settled out of court is very small, the number of orders and judgments covers nearly the total number of accidents compensated (exclusive of these leading only to temporary disability).

It is very important, however, to emphasize that in these tables not the number of accidents occurring or reported, but the number of decrees and orders issued by courts within each year is stated. As it naturally takes some time before all such cases are adjudicated, this exaggerates the growth of the figures from year to year, the data for the first years appearing too low, and the rate of increase too great.

Of the total of 159,585 accidents thus disposed of by the courts up to the close of the year 1908, 148,531, or 93.1 per cent, occurred to adult males, and 4,499, or 2.8 per cent, to male children under 16 years of age, making the total for male employees 95.9 per cent; the accidents to adult female employees numbered 5,733, or 3.6 per cent, and to females under 16 years of age, 822, or 0.5 of 1 per cent, making a total of 4.1 per cent for female employees; or by age groups, 96.7 per cent of adults and 3.3 per cent of children under 16. years of age.