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As a member of the Industrial Commission, I had the opportunity to be, and did become, a member of the International Association of Industrial Accident Boards and Commissions - international because it was the United States and Canada - which was exactly what its name said it was. It was an association of persons who were officially members of Workmen's Compensation Commissions or Boards, and administered those laws. That was a very vital, very vigorous, very interesting organization. To that organization there belonged Ethelbert Stewart, who was the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States Department of Labor. I knew him. He always came and was always picturesque. He gathered a lot of statistics about workmen's compensation and he more or less agreed with me about these things, including what was my pet problem, which was that we should get rid of what had come to be the practise of the insurance companies - merit rating. Merit rating is a device by which the insurance companies grade the risk that they take when they insure a given employer against accidents to his employees. It was originally intended to be an effort to stimulate accident prevention work and machine guarding by giving them a reduced insurance rate if they had every machine guarded and an accident prevention program in operation. It came to be a device whereby they graded