EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

AMONG citizens, law-makers, and public officials there is a wide-spread desire for better roads, better schools, better methods of taxation, better labor laws, better 1 safety appliances in hazardous occupations, better insurance against work accidents, better regulation of public utilities, better banking laws, better corrupt practices legislation, better court procedure, and better methods of public administration in general.

As citizens, law-makers, and public officials we are all alike deeply concerned in these vital questions of political, industrial, and social welfare. We may confess ignorance in regard to some of these matters; and at times we may feel that, along with the rest of the world, we are hopelessly groping in the dark. But not one of us is at heart really indifferent to the problems of human betterment although it is true that our desire for better things, both for ourselves and for others, invariably outruns our knowledge of how wisely to bring them to

pass.

Real advancement is so elaborately slow that we find it difficult at times to resist the temptation to take short cuts to progress. There are so many obstacles on the road to permanent betterment, so many petty mistakes and so many temporary failures on the journey, that we sometimes lose heart and despair of ever reaching the