on the New York "Evening Journal" named Ferguson, a great pro-Wilson man and author of a strange book called "The Revolution Absolute," came to Democratic campaign headquarters to tell me about a certain lawyer in Kansas City.

"He has n't decided yet whether he is for Wilson or for Roosevelt. He has a great deal of influence with the voters out his way."

I was interested immediately. Ferguson went on to say that he thought that if the influential undecided could see and talk to Wilson, he would be ours. I said, "Wire him to come on at once."

He came. And so one torrid July day, Frank P. Walsh and I journeyed together down to Sea Gate, where Woodrow Wilson had his summer cottage. After lunch Eleanor Wilson and I went off to an adjacent riflerange, leaving her father and Mr. Walsh alone on the piazza. By the way, the man in charge of the riflerange was introduced to me this year as the new senator from Iowa, Mr. Brookhart.

When we came back to the cottage, there was Mr. Walsh, convinced that Mr. Wilson's progressiveness was more progressive than the colonel's, and

bureau for social workers was to be established as part of the Democratic campaign and that Frank P. Walsh of Kansas City was to be in charge of it. I did not see much of Mr. Walsh again until the next July, after President Wilson's inauguration, when the President named the personnel of the Federal Industrial Relations Commission. The commission created during President Taft's administration by act of Congress at the suggestion of a group of public-spirited citizens under the leadership of Jane Addams was to investigate the causes of industrial unrest in the country. The McNamara case had vividly called the public attention to the fact that through the length and breadth of the land there was armed warfare between wageearners and profit-makers.

The commission had nine members, representing equally public, capital, and labor. After Mr. Louis Brandeis had declined the chairmanship, the office fell to Frank P. Walsh. With my appointment as one of the commissioners representing the public began a new chapter in my life. Heretofore I had been interested in labor, but it was "on my own." I felt now that it was vastly important for me to understand thoroughly

the whole industrial war, because I was a public servant. I felt that I was on my honor as a woman to make as few mistakes as possible. There were too many critics of women in public life, not to speak of the women specialists in industrial matters, like Florence Kelley who had, I presume, reservations about the selection of a comparative amateur.

I prepared to move to Washington. Bordie, enthusiastic as ever about the things that were happening to add interest to my life, fell in love with Washington, as I had.

At one of the first parties I went to after we took the New Hampshire Avenue house, I met Mrs. Patterson, mother of Cissie Cizycka and Joe Patterson. She was a stately, but lively, figure with her pretty face and rich white brocade dinner gown and ropes of pearls. She gave me a sharp look. "So you 're the dangerous woman who 's come down to take all our money away from us?"

As curtain-raiser to the two years that were to follow came the incident of Mr. Garretson's telephoning to me from New York to Mount Kisco on July 1, ostensibly to say how glad he was about my appointment, but also to tell me that a strike vote had been taken by the four railway brotherhoods, and that within forty-eight hours traffic on the Eastern railroads would be tied up unless some means of arbitration could be agreed upon. Mr. Garretson was president of the Brotherhood of Railway Conductors at that time.

I had been hearing of this danger all through June from various civic federation officials, but Mr. Garretson's message brought the thing home to me as imminent disaster, and as I

stood there at the telephone, I suddenly felt that the responsibility was mine. Everybody has that experience in life, especially people who are impulsive by nature. All sorts of things seem social responsibilities, but one "lets George do them," until suddenly some situation is singled out by impulse, and one plunges into action. I asked Mr. Garretson to meet me the next day at my house in New York, and for two hours we thrashed over the situation.

I found out that the men were demanding higher wages, and that the railroad executives were answering them by declaring the roads too poor to pay more to their employees until they had authority to raise rates. Under the proposed Newlands Bill, both sides, Garretson assured me, were willing to come together. The solution seemed simple to me, for I was still young in the ways of governments.

Unabashed by the fact that the President had already gone to Cornish for the summer, I called up Tumulty at Avon, New Jersey, and arranged to bring him all the facts I had the next day. July 4, at seven o'clock, I journeyed down to Avon in the heat, going over and over again in my mind all that Garretson had told me.

I had talked with Tumulty hardly ten minutes before he exclaimed:

"Why, this is serious. It won't do at all for this strike to take place. It would seriously damage the administration."

I saw the machinery of government started, and came home. Within the week the President returned to the capital, and the Newlands Bill, as the newspapers said, was "jammed" through Congress. There was no strike. And my faith in arbitration

So much happened in the two years that followed my appointment as Walsh's fellow-commissioner until the last stormy hours when I refused to sign his report that I cannot recall what my first impression of him was. My opinion of him now is that he would have made a very good labor representative, but I still question his suitability as one of the representatives of the public. He was quite sincere in his desire to better labor conditions, but quite unjust, I often thought, in many of his conclusions about capital. He is a born agitator, with a very engaging personality. To me he was always the lawyer, not the judge; always cross-examining, as though capital were in the dock, and helping labor with the spot-light.

One of the employers' representatives on the commission was Mr. Harris Weinstock of California, a very enlightened citizen on industrial matters, whose political ideal was Hiram Johnson. According to Weinstock, there was no question Johnson could

better than Woodrow Wilson or Roosevelt. There was something humorous as well as touching about his enthusiastic awe for his hero.

Thruston Ballard, flour-mill owner from Louisville, Kentucky, another of the employers' representatives, was one of the most amusing and original men I have ever met, and the most completely outspoken. Walsh had appointed me resident commissioner, and I used to go to see Brandeis and other people whom we were consulting. Ballard complained of me to the chairman before the whole commission, saying that he did n't think it fair of me to go alone. After that I did my best to see that he missed nobody, and we went about and learned the ropes of Washington together. And I grew to like his forthrightness. I've never seen people enjoy being in the public service and doing a government job more than Ballard and his charming wife, whose name was "Sunshine."

The third representative of the employers was Mr. Frederic Delano, a delightful and cultivated gentleman, greatly in the confidence of both railway owners and railway employees, and an urbane, restraining influence on our chairman.

Of the labor men, Garretson was the strongest. Mr. John B. Lennon of Illinois, vice-president of the A. F. of L., was particularly kind to me. He was one of the most sympathetic men I ever knew. Distressing testimony would always make the tears run down his cheeks, and yet he was always tolerant of the employers' side. Mr. James O'Connell, the other labor representative, did n't believe in women in public life. At first he made me feel like a specimen from the

zoo; but after a few months his voice lost some of the growl, and I liked him. I discovered through him and others that labor is just as uncordial to women in politics and industry as are our business men.

In the first few months of the hearings, when employers were subpoenaed, I began having interesting experiences. Men whom I had casually met once, perhaps, in my life years before would write and remind me of the acquaintanceship and ask if they might call. Lovely flowers would come to my house from those about to be crossexamined. No matter how self-complacent I may have been, I could n't entirely put down these sudden outbursts of emotion to any personal charm. It was a play to feminine vanity through indirect influence with a vengeance. Most employers, however, treated me, just as the labor representatives did, as one of the members of the commission. The commissioners themselves let me taste the joys of being "just a person" instead of a lady, and took off their coats and smoked cigars, and we were all comfortable on the job together.

The commission's work was to have been twofold. There were to be hearings to which witnesses from both sides of various industrial disputes were to be called, and scientific and academic investigations were to be made. In the end, most of the money and time went toward mere hearings. We did succeed in dramatizing the hidden facts of industrial warfare, and it is true that for the first time labor felt that a branch of the Government was giving them a full say and a square deal. Walsh made them feel that way, but the commission was named to do more than that, and we

did n't do it. T comforts me by saying that the eleven volumes of our published hearings are not dead. "Those eleven volumes," he prophesies to me, "may seem to be sharing the moldy fate of most government print, but they are the 'Comédie Humaine' of America. They tell from a thousand angles the story of industrial unrest. The war is still on. Most of what the experts advised is still undone." He argues with me that the most important thing ten years ago was to make people aware of the economic drama. "It had to be staged," he says, "and your unjudicial chairman was just the impresario that was needed. What could your experts do with a country that was n't ready to admit that it needed them?”

I had been acting as resident commissioner for about two months when trouble broke out in New York over the resigning of the peace protocol, the instrument under which the cloakand-suit industry had enjoyed a fairly amicable four years of arbitration since the big strike of 1910. Telegrams from many sources were sent appealing to the commission to come to New York and hold hearings, so that the whole difficulty could be thoroughly investigated for the benefit of both the public and the industry itself. Chairman Walsh was away in Kansas City. I hastened to consult Mr. Brandeis, who from the time Anne Morgan and I had gone to him during the Lawrence strike had always been ready to talk with me about industrial matters. He advised our accepting the call from New York and seemed to feel that our going might save the protocol from breaking down. I got Walsh on the long-distance telephone. He was in the middle of trying a case,

but told me to go ahead and preside at the hearings. My ideal for the hearings may have been a very calm review of causes, but what I had on my hands was heated and noisy dispute. I wielded my gavel like a pickax. The chief clerk of the board of grievance of the cloak trade and the secretary of the Garment Workers' Union started to rush each other. The principals in the dispute, which was bitter, as I now know all economic disputes are, were not the only ones who kept me pounding for peace and quiet. Our own judicial Mr. Ballard, hot and gallant Southern gentleman, during testimony of how, in a certain strike, a foreman had insulted a girl, jumped to his feet.

"I am from Kentucky, and in my State, if a foreman grossly insulted a girl, he would have got a beating, and been left three quarters dead instead of being remonstrated with. A strike would n't have been the weapon.' Much shouting and denial followed.

In the end the protocol was signed again, all of which redounded to the commission's good name.

Sometimes we were sent for by workers and by employers who wanted the national attention focused on their own districts or industries. More often we made lists of those who had special information on one of the many subjects assigned to us by the original enactment, and subpoenaed them to give their testimony. We called before us a cross-section of America, from John D. Rockefeller himself down to widows of miners in his companies who had been shot by state troopers.

I think I can say that during those two years the work of the Industrial Relations Commission, its probe into the causes of the misery and unrest of the workers, was the focus of attention

not only of the United States, but of the entire world. The sessions of the commission were at all times open to the public and to the reporters. Even the members of the commission were surprised at the eagerness of the young reporters to give news of the sessions to their papers, and at the great interest which those reports aroused in the public. Editorials and feature stories, written from all angles of the problems of labor and capital, appeared in both American and foreign papers.

As we moved from city to city over the United States, now concentrating on some specific strike, now trying to find out what the efficiency engineers do not only to increase production, but to make the factory system more tolerable for the worker, now trying to trace the history of the I.W.W. and their hold on the migratory workers in the lumber-camps, now touching on the problems of immigration both from Europe and the Orient, now inquiring about child-workers and about illiterates, all kinds and varieties of people, with every sort of economic standing and religion, came before us. Each bore witness what the economic struggle looked like from his angle, and many attempted to say how conditions might be bettered. What they told us was told again in the newspapers. We gave the gift of tongues to many people.

One day in Washington the maid told me that I had a visitor. I went down, and found in the garden a little old woman in a tidy bonnet, at first glance the sort of benign little body, if one lived somewhere on Main Street, one would like for a neighbor. You could go to her to find out about the children's croup or mixing bread dough. She said she had come to see