changed. The American Federation of Labor is no longer the harried and almost outlawed organization that it was for so many years. The federal government recognized it during the war and asked its co-operation in organizing the production of the necessary volume of war supplies. Immigration has ceased and will not return to its former volume. The wageearning class won a substantial increase in economic power and independence. No doubt the relation of the wage-earners to their employers is still of more importance to them than their relation to the state, but under the new conditions the attempt to keep the two relationships separate will suffer from manifest artificialities. The government interferes in all considerable industrial controversies, and this interference has only begun. When the wage-earners demand union recognition, a universal eight-hour day, a national minimum of health and security and the nationalization of the railroads and the coal mines, they are putting forth a programme with political aspects whose fulfillment will depend in the end upon their ability to exercise political power.

If the American Federation of Labor does not recognize the meaning of these changes and assist instead of opposing the formation of an American Labor party, it will in the long run forfeit its leadership of the American wage-earner. The conditions are favorable and the time has come for the American worker to take the aggressive, and to insist on those changes in our political institutions which will vindicate his claim to industrial citizenship. American labor leaders have preached for years the doctrine that wage-earners should not be treated as a commodity. They have organized and agitated and fought in order to force on industrial managers the recognition of wage-earners as human beings whose welfare should not be subordinated to the making of profits. They must continue to organize, to agitate, to negotiate and to strike for the purpose of insisting on the prior claim of their needs as human beings upon the product and process of industry. Indirect political action, as they know, affords no substitute for direct action. But the converse is also true. If they try by direct action alone to prevent labor from being treated as a commodity, they will either fail or they will land in revolution. The reorganization of American social and industrial life for the purpose of subordinating the mechanical and capitalistic element in industry to the human element is in large part a

political problem. The wage-earners cannot trust the Democratic and Republican parties to carry on the work. Its accomplishment demands the co-operation of the hand and brain workers of the nation, consciously organized and educated for participation in this essentially political task.

The existing industrial situation illustrates the need of supplementing direct with political action. During the war the wage-earners benefitted by an inexhaustible demand for commodities which enabled them to obtain uninterrupted employment at increased wages. Since the end of the war the demand for commodities particularly in the metal industries has diminished. The volume of production has diminished with the demand. The price of metal products is coming down and will come down still further. Hitherto no general reduction of wages has taken place, but many wage-earners are being discharged and employers are insisting upon lower wages as a necessary corollary of lower prices. But if wages are lowered and unemployment increased, even though rent, food, clothing remain at their present high prices, the industrial management of the country will have treated labor as a commodity. They will sacrifice the public interest in maintaining high standards of living to the avoiding of losses or the making of profits. What else can the managers of particular industries do? They can, of course, devote much more intelligence and consideration to handling the problem of hiring and firing and dealing with their employees than they have done in the past, but they cannot risk bankruptcy by operating at a loss. The better employers are frequently obliged to follow the example of less scrupulous competitors and to ask their employees to choose between work under hard conditions at low wages or no work at all. The opponents of political action expect by striking to prevent such a clear assertion of the principle that labor is a commodity, and under prevailing conditions the strike is a more powerful weapon than formerly. But the strike is not a powerful weapon for the unskilled workers outside of the A. F. of L., and by basing their whole campaign on it the wage-earners will accomplish their end, if at all, with a maximum of loss, bitterness of feeling and social friction. Another supplementary way of breaking down the time-honored practice of treating labor as a commodity is to follow the example of the English workers and seek the sanction of law for certain national minimum standards of work, wages and union recog

nition. The legalizing of such standards, and the industrial reorganization which must accompany it, is a task of industrial statesmanship in which the workers organized and educated for participation in politics must co-operate, and which the politicians will evade unless labor prepares for effective political action.

They cannot trust the job to the Republican and Democratic parties. Both of the older parties are committed by the instinct of self-preservation to prevent the adoption by the state of a principle which would be so subversive of existing privileges as that of testing the management of industry by its success in promoting the welfare of the wage-earners as human beings. The Democrats in their anti-trust legislation affirmed the principle that labor was not a commodity, but the affirmation in question was a perfect example of the gold bricks with which politicians are always willing to placate getrich-quick social or labor reformers. Since 1868 when reforming agitation started in this country, the political machines of the two parties, by keeping in their own hands the framing and carrying out of "progressive" legislation, have frustrated every attempt to liberate American politics and business from subservience to special interests. The agitation of the last fifty years has, indeed, clipped the wings of the state and national political "bosses." It has hampered the accumulation of fortunes such as those of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt families. But it has not removed any of the fundamental abuses of American politics or business. Future agitation will not succeed any better until it undermines the governing power of the political and business machines. As long as they continue to exercise control over politics and business the whole system of privilege is safe. The machine bosses can always yield, as they have so frequently yielded in the past, to temporary pressure; but if they participate in drawing the legislation and control its administration they know they cannot come to serious harm. The social ideals of the working class will never have a chance of success as long as the country is governed by two national parties, the underlying object of whose machines necessarily is to keep political and economic power in the safe custody of its present possessors.

If the American wage-earner wishes, consequently, to humanize American industry he must organize for this partly political task by qualifying and equipping himself to become a

power in politics. He is learning the futility of political democracy unless sustained by industrial democracy; but he has still to learn the other half of the lesson. Industrial democracy needs to be sustained by the practice of political democracy. Effective political democracy for the wage-earner demands the organization of a national party of brain and hand workers to conduct constitutional agitation on behalf of those larger modifications of American institutions which are required by industrial democracy. By entering into politics in the interest of their own programme they will act in obedience to the American democratic tradition which is that of using political agitation as an indispensable educational agency of social adjustment. It is the alternative method of banking on a combination of direct action plus the solicitation of concessions and favors from the lords of party politics which carries with it the dangerous and subversive consequences. For the politicians will frustrate labor progressivism just as they have frustrated all the other progressive movements of the last fifty years. When they realize they are being fooled, the labor unions will become exasperated and insurgent. They may succumb to the temptation of enforcing their demands by such extreme forms of direct action as a general strike, and in a nation whose political constitution is as rigid as that of the United States a general strike or a strike in a group of key industries might lead to revolution.

Considering the predestined increase in power of the wageearners and the substantial justice of their demands for the humanization of industry, it is of the utmost importance for themselves and for the nation that they organize and educate themselves for effective political action. The one agency of effective political action is a national party organization. By forming a Labor party they will at once clarify their own programme, deposit it on the table for nation-wide and serious political discussion, and assume the responsibility of adjusting the programme to that of the other economic classes. The political effort of organizing a Labor party will tend to nationalize the American labor movement. It will force the tradeunionists to seek the assistance of the unskilled workers, of the increasing body of co-operatives and of the minority of brain workers who wish to share the aspirations and would like to contribute to the success of their brothers-in-labor. But above all it will force them to adjust their programme to

that of the discontented farmers who form such a large part of the American electorate and whose own economic grievances the political parties have so often smothered. For the first time in the history of American politics, the clear political possibility exists of an alliance between the representatives of agrarian and industrial discontent. A national Labor party which emphatically repudiates revolutionary socialism and which commits itself to an experimental programme of industrial and agrarian co-operative democracy, re-enforced by democratic community organization and so far as necessary by direct tradeunion action, has become a necessary and a salutary agency of American social progress.

SHOULD A POLITICAL LABOR PARTY BE

FORMED?1

The following address by President Gompers was fully considered by the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and unanimously indorsed. The address expresses the judgment of the executive council to protect and to promote the best interests of the workers and of the labor movement of America. It conforms to the letter and spirit of the provisions of the constitution of the American Federation of Labor, Article III, section 8:

"Party politics, whether they be Democratic, Republican, Socialistic, Populistic, Prohibition, or any other, shall have no place in the conventions of the American Federation of Labor."

While local and central bodies and state federations may enter into the political field, either independently or otherwise, it is not within their province to form or become part of a national political party. (Adopted by the executive council of the American Federation of Labor at its meeting held in New York City on Dec. 28, 1918.)

In the last few weeks there have been published certain situations which exist and certain movements which were about to be inaugurated. In a few of the cities that situation and that movement have become accentuated. In Chicago, New

1 From an address by Samuel Gompers, President American Federation of Labor. Reprint, Hearings, Committee on Education, U. S. Senate on Senate Resolution 382. January 4, 1919. Washington, D. C.