there still remain the spirit of fraternity and the confidence that the American labor movement will stand for the rights of humanity, of the workers in all of the countries, and will insist upon the paramount importance of humanity. Yet to maintain the force of our labor movement straight and unerring, has not been an easy task. There have been innumerable influences that have sought to fasten themselves upon the labor movement of this country because they recognized its power and because they desired to use it to serve their own purposes. It has been due to the integrity, the honor and manhood of the wage-earners that many efforts to embroil our country in the present international complications have failed. They have held their ideals too dear to be sacrificed to personal gain, and they have not deviated from the determination to make all forces and all conditions contribute to the progress of the labor movement which is the well-being of the wage-earners. In every trade they have sought to obtain higher wages, shorter hours of work, and better working conditions. They have used their influence to secure not personal benefits, but something that would lift the labor movement upon a higher plane with greater opportunities. These efforts to use the labor movement have come in all manner of guises. They have come as humanitarian efforts; they have come as patriotic appeals; they have come as promoting the highest ideals which human beings have conceived. But the trade union movement of America has steadfastly refused to be moved from the principles upon which it has built up its present power and effectiveness. The trade union movement, the powerful militant organization in industry for the protection of the rights of the workers and for the maintenance of industrial justice, has refused to give its sanction to any political movement in furtherance of peace at any price. While the trade union movement recognizes that peace is absolutely necessary for normal, consecutive development and progress, yet it refuses to secure this peace at the sacrifice of ideals and standards of justice. It maintains that a necessary assurance of peace is power for self-protection and readiness to maintain rights. The principes of statesmanship that hold true in the industrial world hold true in the political world. The trade union movement holds that peace in any relationship can be secured only when justice prevails and that peace follows because men are accorded their rights and are astured opportunities for necessary progress. The trade union movement is founded upon democratic principles; therefore, it holds that people have a right to work out their own salvation according to their own ideals. In accord with this ideal it refuses to sanction any effort to interfere with others who are working out their own problems. ther, it holds that it ought to take advantage of every opportunity to plan for peace in a constructive way. At the Philadelphia Convention, the trade union movement endorsed a proposal that when the nations shall meet to determine upon conditions of peace at the conclusion of the present war, that represen tatives of the masses of all the nations--ought to be preswage-earners-the great ent in order to present and insist upon conditions and declaration that shall provide for

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the safety and the advancement of human welfare and shall maintain human rights as of greater importance than any other consideration. The trade union movement insists that a human being is of greater importance than the product of his toil. The human being is the creator and in him lies that infinitely valuable thing creative genius Creative genius is the thing that civilization and the agencies of civilization ought to protect. This is the principle which the trade union movement has endorsed, and which it proposes to further in all of the councils of state. As we have said again and again, the trade union movement is as wide and as deep as human life. There is nothing that concerns human life that is foreign to the labor movement. While the efforts of the trade union movement are directed first of all to secure certain material benefits, these benefits are for the purpose of promoting and advancing human life. has been demonstrated that the shorter workday lengthens the lives of the workers. It gives them opportunities for better living. It is indisputable that higher wages provide the workers with necessaries for better liv ing, and therefore make better men and women. Improved conditions of work protect the health of the workers, conserve their productive power and make them of greater value to themselves and the nation.

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A. F. of L. Thanked by Wilson-(1918, The White House, Washington, D. P. 134) C., June 10, 1918. Samuel Gompers, American Federation of Labor. St. Paul, Minn.: Please convey to the Thirty-eighth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor my congratulations upon the patriotic support which the members of your organization have given to the war program of the nation in the past year, not only in the trenches and on the battlefield where so many of our younger men are now in uniform, but equally in the factories and shipyards and workshops of the country where the army is supported and supplied by the loyal industry of your skilled craftsmen. We are facing the hardships of the critical months of the struggle. The nation can face them confidently assured now that no intrigues of the enemy can ever divide our unity by means of those industrial quarrels and class dissensions which he has tried so dilligently to foment. In these days of trial and self sacrifice the American workingman is bearing his share of the national burden nobly. In the new world of peace and freedom which America is fighting to establish his place will be as honored as his service is gratefully esteemed.

WOODROW WILSON.

termination to give wholehearted support to the government of our free country in this war to establish principles of freedom that will insure peace between the nations. We are doing and will continue to do our part whether at the front or at home and will share the burdens and the sacrifices. We pledge loyal support and service until human freedom and equity shall be the common right of all peoples." (p. 134) This message was received from the National Council of Defense: Washington, D. C., June 10, 1918. Frank Morrison, Secretary American Federation of Labor, St. Paul Hotel, St. Paul, Minn. I am directed by the Council of National Defense to transmit to you the following resolution passed by the Council and Advisory Commission:

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"Whereas, The Council of National Defense and the Advisory Commission cognizant of the Thirty-eighth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor; and

"Whereas, The Council of National Defense and Advisory Commission are equally cognizant of the affirmative patriotic service rendered to the people, and the Government of the United States by the organized labor movement and the workers of America generally in the tremendous task now stretching before this republic and her allies in the world struggle for freedom, justice and democracy, be it

"Resolved, And it is hereby resolved. that the Council of National Defense and Advisory Commission transmit to the Thirty-eighth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor the deep appreciation of this national service, and further of their knowledge of the efforts on the part of Samuel Gompers, Esquire, President of the American Federation of Labor, to make this service a tangible and vital thing in the interest of America and her allies. "W. S. GIFFORD."'

American Alliance for Labor and Democracy (1917, pp 94-283) In May, 1917, a convention call was sent throughout New York State by the so-called Workingmen's Council, a branch of the People's Council, requesting unions to send delegates to a conference to be held in New York City to consider what provisions ought to be made to protect the interests of labor during the war. Because of the call there was apprehension lest wage earners of that city should be alienated from the best interests of America and from cooperation with American workers. The president of the A. F. of L., realizing the serious situation, in conjunction with the Central Federated Union, called a conference in New York City of the workers of the state at which a local organization was formed and given the name of the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy. The simple declaration on which the conference began work was follows:

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"It is the sense of this conference that it is the duty of all the people of the United States, without regard to class, nationality, politics or religion, faithfully and loyally to support the government of the United States in carrying the present war for justice, freedom and democracy to a triumphant conclusion, and we pledge ourselves to every honorable effort for the accomplishment of that purpose."

When the insidious efforts of the enemies of our country had reached out into many of the states, it became clear that the true representatives of labor and democracy in this country ought to call a national conference to make plain not only their position but to disclose the disrupting destructive A conpurposes of the other movements. ference was therefore held in Minneapolis beginning September 5. Each person who participated signed the following:

The undersigned hereby affirms that it is the duty of all the people of the United States, without regard to class, nationality, politics or religion, faithfully and loyally to support the government of the United States in carrying on the present war for justice, freedom and democracy to a triumphant conclusion and gives this pledge to uphold every honorable effort for the accomplishment of that purpose, and to support the A. F. of L. as well as the declaration of organized labor's representatives made March 12, 1917, at Washington, D. O., as to "Labor's Position in Peace or in War," and agrees that this pledge shall be his right to membership in this conference of the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy. President Wilson, who had been invited to attend, sent this reply:

"I am

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sure that you understand that my inability to accept the invitation to address the Minneapolis conference of the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy is due only to official necessity, and not in any degree to lack of appreciation of the importance of the occasion. cause you and your fellow patriots uphold is one with the cause we are defending with arms. While our soldiers and sailors are doing their manful work to hold back reaction in its most brutal and ag gressive form, we must oppose at home the organized and individual efforts of those dangerous elements who hide disloyalty behind a screen of specious and evasive phrases. I have read with real pride the names of the men and women who are to take part in the Minneapolis conference. Not one but has a record of devoted service to fundamental democracy; not one but has fought the long, hard fight for equal justice, braving every bitterness that the humblest life might know a larger measure of happiness. With all my heart I want them to feel that their devotion to country is in nowise a betrayal of principle, and that in serving America today they are serving their cause no less faithfully than in the past. I myself have had sympathy with the fears of the workers of the United States; for the tendency of war is toward reaction, and too often military necessities have been made an excuse for the destruction of laboriously erected industrial and social standards. These fears, happily, have proved to be baseless. With quickened sympathies and appreciation, with a new sense of the invasive and insidious dangers of oppression, our people have not only held every inch of ground that has been won by years of struggle, but have added to the gains of the Twentieth Century along every line of human betterment. Questions of wages and hours of

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labor and industrial readjustment have found a solution which gives to the toiler a new dignity and a new sense of social and economic security. I beg you to feel that my support has not been lacking and that the government has not failed at any point in granting every just request advanced by you and your associates in the name of the American worker. No one who is not blind can fail to see that the battle line of democracy for America stretches today from the fields of Flanders to every house and workshop where toiling, upward striving men and women are counting the treasures of right and justice and liberty which are being threatened by our present enemies. It has not been a matter of surprise to me that the leaders in certain groups have sought to ignore our grievances against the who have equally misled the German people. Their insistence that a nation whose rights have been grossly violated, whose citizens have been foully murdered under their own flag, whose neighbors have been invited to join in making conquest of its territory, whose patience in pressing the claims of justice and humanity has been met with the most shameful policy of truculence and treachery; their insistence that a nation so ortraged does not know its own mind, that it has no comprehensible reason for defending itself, or for joining with all its might in maintaining a free future for itself and its ideals, is of a piece with their deafness to the oft-repeated statement of our national purposes. Is it, perhaps, that these forces of antagonism have not yet learned to know the voice of that America we love and serve! It may well be that those among us who stand ready to forward the plans of ag gression bred in secret do not understand the language of democracy when it proclaims the purposes of war in terms of a peace for the peoples that shall be untroubled by those to whom men are but the pawns in their struggle for power and gain. But true Americans, those who toil here for home and the hope of better things, whose lifted eyes have caught the vision of a liberated world, have said that of the policy of blood and iron there shall be an end and that equal justice, which is the heart of democracy, shall rule in its stead. May not those who toil and those who have made cause of the larger hope for the masses of mankind take renewed heart as they think on these days when America has taken its stand for the rights of humanity and the fellowship of social and international justice? Sincerely

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yours,

"WOODROW WILSON.' The purpose and the spirit of the conference is disclosed in the following declaration unanimously adopted:

"The American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, in its first national conference, declares its unswerving adherence to the cause of democracy, now assailed by the forces of autocracy and militarism. As labor unionists, social reformers and socialists, we pledge our loyal support and service to the United States, government and its allies in the present world conflict. We declare that the one overshadowing issue is the preservation of democ

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racy, either democracy will endure and men will be free, or autocracy will triumph, and the race will be enslaved. On this prime issue we take our stand. We declare that the great war must be fought to a decisive result; that until autocracy is defeated there can be no hope of an honorable peace, and that to compromise the issue is only to sow the seed for bloodier and more devastating wars in the future. We declare our abhorrence of war and our devotion to the cause of peace. Put we recognize that there are evils greater and more intolerable than those of war We declare that war waged for evil ends niust be met by war waged for altruistic ends. peace bought by the surrender of every principle vital to democracy is no peace, but shameful servility. Our nation has not sought this war. As a people, we desired peace for its own sake, and held fast to our traditional principle of keeping aloof from the political affairs of Europe. Our President, with a forbearance and a patience which some of us thought extreme, exhausted every honorable means in behalf of peace; and the declaration of war came only after many months of futile efforts to avoid a con flict. This war, 80 relentlessly forced upon us, must now be made the means of insuring a world-wide and permanent peace. We declare that in this crisis the one fundamental need is unity of action. The successful prosecution of the war requires that all the energies of our people be concentrated to a common purpose. After more than two years of exhaustive deliberation, in which every phase of our relation to the great world problem had been thoroughly debated, the constitutional representatices of the people declared the nation's will. Loyalty to the people demands that all acquiesce in that decision and render the government every service in their power. We strongly denounce the words and actions of those enemies of the Republic who, falsely assuming to speak in the name of labor and democracy, are now ceaselessly striving to obstruct the operations of the government. In misrepresenting the government's purposes, in traducing the character of the President and of his advisers, in stealthily attempting to incite sedition and in openly or impliedly counselling resistance to the enforcement of laws enacted for the national defense, they abuse the rights of free speech, free assemblage and a free press. In the name of liberty they encourage anarchy; in the name of democracy they strive to defeat the will of the majority, and in the name of humanity they render every possible aid and comfort to the brutal Prussian autocracy. If the sinister counsels of these persons were followed, labor would be reduced to subjection and democracy would be obliterated from the earth. We declare that the betrayal of one's fellow-workers during a strike finds its exact counterpart in the betrayal of one's fellow-citizens in time of war, and that both are offenses which deserve the detestation of mankind. We declare that a sturdy defense of the interests of labor is wholly compatible with supreme loyalty to the government.

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We fully recognize the many proofs given by the President and the administration chiefs to the principle that the war shall not be made an excuse for lowering any of the standards which have been estab lished by labor in its long struggle. We declare, however, that predatory influences are at work at all times-and particularly in time of war to lower these standards. These efforts, wherever made, must be resisted. Not only must all present standards be maintained, but there must be no curtailment of any of the present agencies which make for the betterment of the condition of labor. Our loyalty to the government is the loyalty of free men who will not acquiesce in any surrender of principle. This war, which on part is waged for the preservation of democracy, has already set in motion base forces for the furtherance and extension of democracy. Revolutionary changes have been made changes which reveal the power and determination of a democratic people to control its own economic life for the common good. We declare that peace shall not be another name for reaction, but that the gains thus far made for labor should be maintained in perpetuity. We declare that a condition which demands the conscription of men likewise demands the conscription of wealth, and that incomes, excess profits and land values should be taxed to the fullest needs of the government. We declare that industrial enterprises should be the servants and not the masters of the people; and that in cases where differences between owners and workers threaten a discontinuance of production necessary for the war, the government should assume complete control of such industries and operate them for the exclusive benefit of the people. We declare that the government should take prompt action with regard to the speculative interests which, especially during the war, have done so much to enhance prices of the necessaries of life. To increase the food supply and to lower prices, the government should commandeer all land necessary for public purposes and should tax idle land in private possession on its full rental value. We declare that the right of the wage-earners to collective action is the fundamental condition which gives opportunity for economic freedom and makes possible the betterment of the workers' conditions. The recognition already given to this principle should be extended and made the basis of all relationships, direct or indirect, between the government and wage-earners engaged in activities connected with the war. We declare that the wage-earners must have a voice in determining the conditions under which they are to give service, and that the voluntary institutions that have organized the industrial, commercial and transportation workers in time of peace shall be unhampered in the exercise of their recognized functions during the war; that labor shall be adequately represented in all the councils authorized to conduct the war and in the commission selected to negotiate terms of peace. We declare our full accord with the declarations agreed upon by the conference of American trade unionists called by the Executive Council

of the A F. of L., held in Washington, D. C., March 12, 1917, in which the representatives of affiliated national and interna tional trade unions and the railroad brotherhoods participated. Believing that the material interests of the nation's soldiers and sailors and of their dependents should be withdrawn from the realm of charity and chance, and that health and life should be fully insured, we indorse the soldiers, and sailors' insurance bill now before Congress. We declare for universal equal suffrage. Fully realizing that the perpetuity of democratic institutions is involved in freedom of speech, of the press and of assemblage we declare that these essential rights must be guarded with zealous care lest all other rights be lost. We declare, however, that where expressions are used which are obstructive to the government in its conduct of the war, or are clearly capable of giving aid or comfort to the nation's foes, the of fenders should be repressed by the constituted authorities in accordance with established law. Inspired by the ideals of liberty and justice herein declared as a fundamental basis for national policies, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy makes its appeal to the working men and women of the United States, and calls upon them to unite in unanimous support of the President and the nation for the prosecution of the war and the preservation of democracy."

A declaration dealing with the Russian It is situation was considered separately. as follows :

"Sons of liberty in all lands are now watching with heavy hearts the desperate contest of their brothers in spirit and arms now battling on the plains of Russia. Born amidst the thunders of the greatest war of all times, the great Russian democracy brought to all lovers of man's freedom a new hope and inspiration. Assailed on all sides by a terrible and insidious foe, now spreading death and devastation in its ranks and now masquerading as a friend and penetrating, under the guise of revolutionist into the very councils of the revolution, the Russian democracy is now passing through the most critical time in its struggle for existence. The American Alliance for Labor and Democracy sends greetings to the fighters for liberty in Russia as brothers in the same cause The aims of the Russian democracy are our aims; its vic tory is our victory and its defeat is our defeat; and even the traitors that assail the Russian democracy likewise assail us. In the conflict for the liberty of Russia, the liberty of America is likewise at stake. Every Russian soldier who faces unflinchingly the enemy in the field is striking a blow for the liberty of America. American Alliance for Labor and Democ racy representing every loyal thought of American labor and American Socialism. pledges and dedicate the American working class to the support and service of the Russian democracy. It calls upon the working people and the socialists of America and also upon the government of the United States to strain every effort and resource in their command to the aid of the Russian democracy, and

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