y a tri-partite board of directors equally representing the
consuming public, the managerial employes, and the classified employes.
An automatic economy-sharing scheme was designed to assure efficient
service at low rates calculated to yield a fixed return on a value shorn
of capitalized privileges.

The purpose of the Plumb Plan is to equalize the opportunities of labor
and capital in using economic power to obtain just rewards for services
rendered to the public. In this respect it resembles many of the land
reform and other "panaceas" which are scattered through labor history.
Wherein it differs is in making the trade unions the vital and organized
representatives of producers' interests entitled to participate in the
direct management of industry. An ideal of copartnership and
self-employment was thus set up, going beyond the boundaries of
self-help to which organized labor had limited itself in the eighties.

But it is easy to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism.
The Plumb Plan has not yet been made the _sine qua non_ of the American
labor program. Although the American Federation of Labor endorsed the
principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions of
1920 and 1921, President Gompers, who spoke against the Plan, was
reelected and again reelected. And in obeying instructions to cooperate
with brotherhood leaders, he found that they also thought it inopportune
to press Plumb Plan legislation actively. So far as the railway men
themselves are concerned, after the Railroad Labor Board set up under
the Esch-Cummins act had begun to pass decisions actually affecting
wages and working rules, the pressure for the Plumb Plan subsided.
Instead, the activities of the organizations, though scarcely lessened
in intensity, have become centered upon the issues of conditions of
employment.

The drift towards independent labor politics, which many anticipate,
also remains quite inconclusive. A Farmer-Labor party, launched in 1920
by influential labor leaders of Chicago (to be sure, against the wishes
of the national leaders), polled not more than 350,000 votes. And in the
same election, despite a wide dissatisfaction in labor circles with the
change in the government's attitude after the passage of the War
emergency and with a most sweeping use of the injunction in the coal
strike, the vote for the socialist candidate for President fell below a
million, that is behind the vote of 1912, notw