sion hearings progressed, I found that the hearings of labor's grievances took more and more time, and the academic studies of legal and scientific problems involved in the administration of labor laws were, it seemed to me, neglected. There was just so much money left of our congressional appropriation. I thought this money should be spent for finishing and publishing expert investigations that Charles McCarthy, who had acted as director of research, and Professor Commons both felt were the most important part of the commission's work.

Imagine the surprise of the employers on the commission and of Professor Commons and me when we learned that Mr. Walsh had summarily dismissed McCarthy, and Basil Manly was put at the helm in his place. Those of us who had stood by McCarthy felt as though we were on a train that in some wayward fashion was tearing east just after the station master had sold us tickets for a point west. The life of the commission was almost over. How were we to go on record? Mr. Walsh let Manly draw up a report summarizing the testimony of the thousands of witnesses we had been hearing in the last two years, and make many recommendations. Walsh signed it himself, the three labor men signed it, and every effort was made to get my signature.

Mother Jones suddenly appeared on the scene again and pleaded with me by the hour. I afterward heard that Walsh personally had paid for her pilgrimage. She said I would be a traitor to the workers if I failed to sign Walsh's report. What she could never understand was that the employers were my own people, that all human beings were my own people. It would

have been disloyal of me not to understand the problems of capital as well as the problems of labor. And it seemed to me that Walsh's report was a high-handed labor report and nothing more. It did not appreciate the technical problems of production.

Professor Commons and I wrote a report of our own, which was in reality the majority report of the commission, for Commissioners Ballard, Weinstock, and Aishton also signed it, making five.

It is audacious of me in a few paragraphs to try to characterize and compare the two reports, for both ran to many hundreds of type-written pages, and were in fact a digest of eleven volumes of testimony. Professor Commons's big proposal was for permanent national and state industrial commissions, to be created for the administration of all labor laws. We believed that probably the greatest cause of industrial unrest was that our American statute-books were encumbered by labor laws that were conflicting, ambiguous, and either unenforceable or only partly enforced. People were losing confidence in the making of laws by the legislature, the interpretation of laws by the courts, and their administration by officials, and came naturally to taking of the law into their own hands. I quote from our report:

"The struggle between capital and labor must be looked upon, so far as we now see, as a permanent struggle, no matter what legislation is adopted."

But we believed that there were certain points where the interests of capital and labor were harmonious and could be made more so, and we believed that the field where no real conflict existed was much wider than

at first might be imagined. We believed that by recognizing these two facts of permanent opposition and progressive coöperation, we had a starting-point from which to reduce antagonism.

The minority report, which somehow as the staff report, took precedence of ours in the publication, seemed to me far less concerned with setting up permanent peaceful machinery than with reciting anew the grievances of labor. I was quite as shocked as they to discover the number of American families with no privacy;-in many working districts thirty per cent. of the workers keep boarders, and to discover that in New York City one corpse out of twelve is laid in a pauper's grave; but it seemed to me that their recommendations were idealistic and socialistic, not practical.

Walsh himself, in a supplemental statement, italicized the following: "We find the basic cause of industrial dissatisfaction to be low wages; or, stated in another way, the fact that the workers of the Nation, through compulsory and oppressive methods, legal and illegal, are denied the full product of their toil."

Later he says: "The responsibility for the conditions rests primarily upon the workers who, blind to their collec

tive strength and oftentimes deaf to the cries of their fellows, have suffered exploitation and the invasion of their most sacred rights without resistance.

Until the workers themselves realize their responsibility and utilize to the full their collective power, no action, whether governmental or altruistic, can work any genuine and lasting improvement."

Statements like that seemed to me incendiary and revolutionary. It was like using the Government to organize one class for swallowing up another.

However differently all of us saw the next steps, not one of the commissioners failed to recognize the historic value of the hearings. Capital and labor had been brought face to face, and in the very airing of their misunderstandings, in the articulation of their bitter hatreds, they had come to understand each other better.

I still believe with Professor Commons that a permanent industrial commission is to be the next great step toward intelligent minimizing of the friction between employers and employed, but it must wait until labor asks for it. Now there is not faith enough among the workers to trust Government to erect such an instrument.

T

HE editorials in American newspapers were once personal affairs. They were made by hand and their readers knew whose hand it was that had fashioned this or that comment upon the news of the morning or evening. Now, however, personality has given way to something less diversified. A newspaper is known by the policy it keeps. As a rule the special editorial hand is not to be recognized except by experts, whose guesses, moreover, are occasionally wrong. But personality is too obstinate a thing to be easily expelled. Thrown out through the door, it comes back through the window and is shortly as much at home as ever. The generation in America which saw the distinctive color dying out of editorials saw at the same time the rise of the distinctive paragraph which kept the editorial section from settling down to any monotony of sense. Deft paragraphers multiplied and made their papers famous. Publisher strove with publisher to catch and develop writers who could be themselves and be amusing every day. Out of so much imitation, so much competition, a standard form emerged. Eugene Field set the standard, as regards dimensions, at a column, and went a

long way toward setting the standard as regards themes and methods. He poked fun at current folly, he told jokes on himself, he turned out yards of brisk, bright verses in his column called "Flats and Sharps." Field lived, however, to divide his honors with George Ade, also a columnist in Chicago, who in his "Stories of the Streets and Town" at once specialized and broadened the functions of their sort of humor. Since Field died and Mr. Ade gave up his column, few decided novelties have been introduced among the paragraphers. Bert Leston Taylor with his "A Line o' Type or Two" long carried on the tradition in Chicago. Other cities have their local wits, several of them of amazing fecundity and pungency. But in New York, to which so many things are drawn by its sheer magnitude, the column has at present its greatest prestige and influence.

There the successful members of the guild enjoy reputations which are unequaled by those of any other contemporary authors. They have, of course, advantages. Not perhaps monthly, like story-writers, nor perhaps annually, like novelists or dramatists, but daily they appear before their publics; and their publics daily

number hundreds of thousands of readers in New York, with possible millions elsewhere for those of the columnists who are taken up by newspaper syndicates. Appearing thus punctually, these wits can pounce first upon the news and make, or publish, the earliest mots on topics that invite them. Appearing thus regularly, these same wits, having beat up their game, can chase it with comic persistence as long as need or interest lasts. Being so topical, they are naturally for the most part also local. They retail the gossip, promulgate the jests, discuss the personalities, represent the manners of New York. To read them in any distant city is to miss half the points they make, or at least half the freshness of their points. They are licensed jesters of the town, free to catch the most respectable citizen momentarily off his guard, without fear of being taken too seriously. They can turn a mayor to ridicule, send hundreds to a theater or keep dozens away from it, stimulate the sales of a book, give a clever phrase household currency, fix public attention upon some neglected figure or episode, past or present, laugh some general hysteria to sleep.

The great audiences which they have by virtue of their positions they hold by their particular qualities. They are immensely personal. They take the public into their confidences with whimsical candor. One of them devotes a day each week to publishing his diary. Another calls out joyfully when he has found a new book or a new drink. Another humorously records his progress in getting rid of superfluous pounds of flesh. Another makes charming capital out and doings of his son.

of the sayings Thus through

the confusion of the daily news they pick their ways and yet preserve their identities. Readers who have found events more or less impartially reported and more or less judicially discussed, like still to find them touched with the hand of comedy by a definite person. The columnists are a perpetual relief from what may be called the newspaper grand style. Nothing is too great for them to bring it before the bar of laughter; nothing is too small for them to flash a beam of light upon it. It is true that they are sometimes accused of forming a smug corporation, exchanging compliments from column to column, overpraising one another's books and plays, capriciously shutting out the dull barbarians who do not habitually cross their paths; but these accusations have so far not become very ominous. If the columnists were not felt to be untrammeled personalities, they would not be felt at all.

There are, indeed, more than four of such Manhattan wits who have each a loyal following. The four, however, who are most widely known and followed happen among them to cover virtually all the ground that the columnists ever cover. They are, as no one questions, Franklin P. Adams of "The Conning Tower," Christopher Morley of "The Bowling Green," Don Marquis of "The Lantern," and Heywood Broun of "It Seems to Me."