LABOR'S HISTORY-MAKING MEETING

...In New York, concurrently, was meeting the National Industrial Conference, quite baldly and boldly expressing the purpose of 15,000 employers, eight billion dollars of capital, and the mastery of seven million workers, chiefly unorganized and underpaid, to oppose and defeat all efforts of all workers, organized or unorganized, to better their economic conditions by conscious control of their own lives and means of livelihood...

...That industrial conference had been called together as the greater successor to the discredited National Association of Manufacturers...

...Practically a union or voluntary working agreement between the Federation and the Brotherhoods was established or given demonstration...

...As an incident, the interests appearing before the Committee or serving notice of their appearance were defining the industrial dispute in a clearer issue than has ever before been defined...

...The Convention, in other words, displayed to the nation its control of the machinery or the instruments with which the workers and producers of wealth are prepared to defend themselves against economic oppressions of combined money or the political tyrannies which combined money assumes the power to inflict...

...At the same time also, the suit of the railroad interests to nullify the Adamson Eight Hour Law was defining itself for presentation to the United States Supreme Court...

...The many specific acts and resolutions of the Convention can hardly be enumerated by a brief survey and appreciation of it...

...With regard to Porto Rico, the resolutions of the Convention demonstrated that the American labor movement wished to extend American protection to human rights rather than to investments of capital in neighboring countries and possessions...

...The Convention illustrated the drawing together of the labor forces by the appearance before it of the chiefs of the four great brotherhoods of railroad employees...

...The Federation assumed definitely the direction and leadership of the movement in America for industrial and economic justice...

...The words, and spirit and action of the Convention were most significant when viewed with the surrounding circumstances of politics, economic crises and world affairs...

...It was, in fact, Labor's legislative comment and Labor's legislative action on the industrial facts disclosed by the United States Commission on Industrial Relations...

...Gompers, in brief review of the line-up of the forces of wealth to crush the labor movement, bade those forces beware that they did not push labor too far...

...The Convention, furthermore, declared again Labor's opposition to militarism and to militaristic training of young persons in the schools...

...That was when Mr...

...Another of the circumstances among which the Convention of the Feder...

...So much was done by the Convention, that the Convention assumed the proportions of a capable legislative Congress...

...It exemplified the custom of those interests to resort to the judicial power for its veto upon democratic legislation...

...Only a day or two before the whole convention, without a dissenting voice, had declared that wherever the power of injunction and compulsion was usurped by a court or judge to throttle liberty, that usurpation of power should be ignored and disobeyed...

...The Industrial Conference Board and the Railroads, who have thrown down the challenge to organized labor will be surprised at the promptness and vigor with which Labor has taken the challenge up...

...Probably, too, in the political development of the country...

...It ratified the steps already taken by the Federation to bring about international peace and good international understandings through cementing international relationships of the working classes...

...That suit was most deeply significant, as illustrating again in a critical time, the unwillingness of great commercial ana financial interests to abide by the law, as expressed by the law-making body, and ratified by popular vote...

...There was an unmistakably self-confident democratic spirit...

...tion was set was the political victory for those domestic moves toward democracy and those policies of international relationships with which the labor movement had just definitely and positively allied itself...

...Incidentally to that wider agreement, there was formed during the Convention closer co-operation between the brotherhoods and those trades allied with them in the transportation service that were already included within the Federation...

...But it was embodied also in definite and direct statements on the fundamental democratic issues of the time...

...It not only ratified the steps already taken, but made further steps forward as affecting especially the United States and Mexico, the South American Republics and Japan...

...The spirit of the Convention was its dominant factor...

...The field for investigation and discussion by the Committee had laid the widest foundation for all industrial inquiry...

...President Samuel Gompers in a spontaneous, notable utterance, struck the note for fundamental democracy in the economic field, that was quite fairly comparable to Lincoln's statement of political democracy in the Gettysburg address...

...Labor's History-Making Meeting An Impression of the Recent Convention of The A. F. of L. By DANTE BARTON THE Baltimore Convention, 1916, of the American Federation of Labor, has set a historic mark in the economic development of the United States...

...Concurrently, also, was meeting in "Washington the Congressional Committee to investigate the Railroads, and the railroad question, and the wage question as affecting the railroads and the transportation problem...

...The instrument or the machinery prepared by the labor movement for its side in whatever industrial struggle impends, is made the more potent by the fact that the supply of workers is now restricted by world facts...