Gem.

Samuel Gompers labored for more than half a century for the advancement of men who earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. Few men have devoted themselves so completely or effectively to the service of others. He began when the ideas he sponsored were unpopular among those for whom he labored. He started as an English Jew making cigars in New York City, but possessed of the idea that working men should stand by working men in a common effort to get more money, shorter hours and better working conditions. He lived to become the leader of millions of wage earners organized into one hundred and ten national labor unions.

His inspirations had the merit of service to those who needed courage and leadership.

dent almost without interruption for a period which approaches half a century. No other labor union in the world so completely absorbs and dominates the labor movement of any country. No other union leader has been so continuously honored by receiving the office of chief executive from so many people for so many years. The railroad brotherhoods, representing 500,000 workers continue out of the Federation, vital movements under able leadership have created so-called outlaw organizations in the needle trades, and the I. W. W.s, which are outbursts of discontent rather than organizations, have at times occupied the headlines of the press; but, on the whole, the Federation, a conservative force among the workers, has been the spokesman of the labor movement

His efforts had the merit of being successful.

The sine qua non of a labor union is to make men organize and stay organized. To this central idea Mr. Gompers devoted himself. His natural gifts as an organizer, rare talents as an orator, his effectiveness as an evangelist in arousing and organizing emotional forces go far to explain his successes and his failures, his virtues and his faults. His intolerance of every idea or influence which seemed to him to conflict or retard the growth and power of unions was so intense that it often brought him into a position of intellectual embarrassment and crass partizanship and it grew as opposition to unrestrained trade union power grew.

Trade unionism is not the first great social movement that intolerance has promoted. But in the case of the American trade union movement it had the bad result of openly resenting and repelling suggestions or guidance from intellectual groups. Again and again Mr. Gompers vehemently informed intellectuals that trade unionism could take care of itself and it was this same attitude which led him to withdraw from the American Association of Labor Legislation which he felt professed to know more about the best interests of the workers than the unions themselves. The contrast with Great Britain in this respect was remarkable. Such a close alliance as existed between the British union movement and the Fabyian Society and men like Sidney Webb was incompatible with the Gomperian point of view.

Mr. Gompers' career as a leader began when the Knights of Labor, struck by the repercussion of the Haymarket bombings, staggered into disintegration. Only a few remnants of the labor movement formed the nucleus upon which he had to build. Today his monument is the American Federation of Labor, of which he has been the presi

giving support to dissenting or rival movements.

From the outset, Mr. Gompers disapproved the industrial form of organization upon which the Knights of Labor was built, and looked to the craft union as the only cohesive basis to carry out the purposes to which he was devoted. The craft union served his purposes because it was less class conscious and less radical in its aims. It did not seek a social revolution, with class reared against class, but the economic bargain between the organized workers and their employers in each particular industry. It was more cohesive because it bottomed solidarity on natural economic groupings, where people of a particular craft, having their own special problems, were thrown together for the consideration of those things which they understood and in which they had daily and intimate interest. Autonomy of each craft, free from interference on the part of the Federation, was the basic idea often expressed. Yet this idea was occasionally abandoned in the face of hard facts. On several occasions the Federation confronted an affiliated union with the alternative of merging with some other affiliated union, or forfeiting its charter and being attacked as nonunion. Some unions with distinguished traditions were roughly handled this way in the interest of militaristic conformity, but on the whole the principle of craft autonomy was upheld.

Above all things Mr. Gompers sincerely feared any form of governmental regulation which would qualify the individual or collective liberties of the working classes. In 1915 the State of Colorado, having just experienced a labor conflict that reached the dignity of civil war, determined to avoid a repetition of such a calamity by the establishment of an Industrial Commission, with power to make compulsory investigations of industrial disputes, pending which strikes and lockouts were forbidden. In August, 1915, the Barbers' Union, of Pueblo, objected