. We are now in the midst of a struggle brought about by the
efforts of the wage earners to add to their traditional rights of
freedom of contract and of enterprise certain other rights. These may be
collectively described as the right to organize and to use their
organized strength collectively in all ways which may be reconciled with
the public interest. Some of the greatest industrial conflicts of recent
years have been consequences of the efforts of the wage earners to
establish these additional rights both in fact and in law (as for
example the strike in the steel and iron industry in 1919). Much headway
has been made in the establishment of the rule of collective bargaining
in industry. The scope of the matters usually settled by that method
varies greatly between individual, establishments and industries.

Organized labor has frequently received official recognition by the fact
of its representation on bodies concerned with the investigation or
control of the conditions of labor, or with general questions arising
out of, or closely connected with, industrial activity--especially
during the war. The President's Second Industrial Conference, which was
appointed to make recommendations concerning the most urgent problems of
industrial relationship that had been accentuated by the war, emphasized
the need for the "deliberate organization" of the relationship between
employer and employees in large industries, but contributed little to
the matters in dispute. Their view was expressed as follows: "To-day we
have a complex interweaving of vital interests. But we have as yet
failed to adjust our human relations to the facts of an economic
interdependence. The process toward adjustment, though slow,
nevertheless goes on. Right relations between employer and employee, in
large industries, can be promoted only by deliberate organization of
that relationship. Not only must the theory that labor is a commodity be
abandoned, but the concept of leadership must be substituted for that of
mastership." The attitude of the community has been to take no step in
advance of what resulted from the trial of argument and force by the
directly interested parties. But it is probable that in the future
public opinion will be more positive and will grant to labor
organizations fuller recognition and greater participation in the
control of industrial activity than heretofore.

It will be impossible to develop any policy of wage settlement whi