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I—9a

E. V. MILLER.

the two years up to date there have been 544 cases relieved by the Benefit Society, and the amounts paid £679 15s. Twenty of those cases would have come under the operations of the Bill if it had become law. 17. The Chairman.] They were over the seven days?— Yes. The amount of compensation actually received by those twenty cases was £87 3s. 4d.; the amount which would have been received under the operations of the Bill if it had become law would have been £84 15s. Bd. 18. Hon. Mr. Millar.] What were the respective figures of the eight cases for the last five j'ears? —1 have not got them summed up on my document. It is hardly possible to go into all the particulars as to the rules of the society, but to my mind these numbers are sufficient to show that on account of the very great number of mishaps which the Benefit Society can and does relieve in comparison with those which the Act would meet the benefits derived from the society are very much greater. 19. Can you give us any idea of what the contributions of the men amounted to during the five years in which you paid out £1,322? —I have not tabulated it. I can read the figures for each year. There are different branches in this Benefit Society, and in the annual balance-sheet the different accounts are kept separate. 20. But you get the total of the men's contributions?—We get the total of what is paid into the fund, which includes the company's subsidy as well as the men's contributions. The men paid half of £323 15s. 9d. for the year 1901 : for the year 1902 the total was £295 14s. 7d., and the half of that would be about £147 10s. The following year the total was £279 14s. lid., or £140 practically; for 1904, £349 10s., or about £175; 1905, £302, or £151 paid by the men. For the last two years, 1906 and 1907, the amounts were £292, or £146; and £394, or £197 as the half contribution. 21. £343 for the two years?— Yes. In fact, the Benefit Society has very little funds in hand; the company's subsidy and the men's contributions are all used for the benefits from year to year. The Benefit Society rules provide that the subscriptions from the men shall be 6d. per week, but there is an agreement with the company at the end of the rules under which the company undertakes to pay half that amount. 22. Do the men actually pay 6d. ?—No, only 3d. 23. But 6d. is credited to each man's account?— Yes. With regard to the Provident Fund, before 1890 there used to be a Provident Fund for the benefit of the officers of the company only, but it was thought desirable by the management in Sydney to extend this so that the whole of the employees should have the benefits of the fund. With your permission I will read what the chairman of the trustees said in reference to this shortly after the inception of the fund. It will give you an idea of how the fund started :— Extract from Speech by Mr. Knox in February, 1892. The Chairman, in proposing the next toast, said, " The last toast on the programme, ' Success to the Provident Fund,' is that of the day, for this meeting is in a measure intended to mark the establishment of the fund, being rightly deferred until it is an accomplished success, having now some 600 members, and assets exceeding in value £15,000 —a large sum considering the short period that the fund has been in existence, but one which will, I hope, be deemed trifling ten years hence, when it should embrace every man in the service who is qualified to subscribe, and amount to at least £100,000. Before.l ask you to join me in drinking to the toast it may be well for me to say something of the evolution of the fund, and of the leading principles of its rules; for I think you all ought to know how the fund originated, and what grounds we have for faith in its future and stability. It was in 1889 that I first began to try and puzzle out some scheme which could take the place of our first confessedly imperfect Provident Fund, and thus provide a, means of living for men growing old in the service or disabled by sickness or accident, and with this object in view I read such books as I could obtain bearing on the matter. These were all, however, about sharing of profits, and I was compelled to put them aside not because such division of profit is an unwise proceeding from the point of view of those who might wish to share the gains without any responsibility for the losses incidental to all trade, but because employees as a class have not yet realised that the profits made are the earnings of the men who find the money, as the weekly or monthly payments to them are the remuneration for their work, and that sharing the profits without likewise bearing part of the losses is in effect accepting a charitable dole. Now I was sure that the last thing you wanted was to sacrifice your independence, or to accept a dole of any sort, and I had therefore to put on one side all the schemes described with much eloquence in the books of which T have spoken, feeling sure that when you wanted part of the profits that were the due earnings of the shareholders' capital you would get this by buying the shares of the company with your savings, and that till then we had better go on the old basis of paying you fairly and duly for the services you rendered to us, and retaining the balance for the proprietors of the business. I did not, however, abandon my search for the Fund, and one day was rewarded by finding in a little book called ' The Management of an English Railway ' a short account of the Provident Fund of the London and North-western Railway, which seemed to me pretty well what I wanted. Details not griren in the book were supplied to me by Mr. Eddy, who took an interest in what I was doing, as he was at the time endeavouring to start such a fund for the railway service—of which, by the way, political jealousy has robbed the railway men—and I then took into my counsels Mr. Walton, and we set to work to draft the leading rules. From the first, however, T decided to make three or four important departures from the English scheme —viz., to put the whole of the employees on the same footing as to subscription, whereas the London and North-Western Fund was for the salaried staff only: to allow of the investment of part of the funds in shares of the company; and to make the rules relating to the return of subscriptions to men leaving the service as liberal as was possible and just. In other