tions of every kind and character to those who are engaged in the disputes and to the community at large. Men do not engage in strikes purely for the amusement it brings them. Men do not engage in strikes for what they consider frivolous reasons. They know what is ahead of them, and are not prone to engage in industrial contests unless they believe they have very real and important grievances to correct which cannot be corrected by other methods. The purpose of this measure is to provide a commission composed of equal numbers of wage workers and employers, with a balance of disinterested parties, to conduct an investigation into the conditions which have created the spirit of unrest and report their findings to Congress from time to time, so that Congress may legislate on the subject if necessary. The province of this committee will be merely to investigate and report. It will not interfere with the work of the proposed Department of Labor."

There were also bills passed to protect the products of free labor from the competition of convict labor products, to make shorter the hours of masters and mates of vessels, and other minor bills for the benefit of labor.

President Taft signed the bill creating the Department of Labor during the very last part of his administration. In the session of Congress March 3, 1913, there was an interesting prophetic scene in the House. Mr. Mann of Illinois, speaking on the Wilson Seamen's bill, said:

"Mr. Speaker, one gentleman who has been most prominent in connection with this bill, both in the committee and on the floor, is a member of this House,

who has been also prominent in other legislation which has been enacted by Congress for years, and I hope that we are saluting the next Secretary of Labor."

Another member promptly said: "I yield five minutes to the next Secretary of Labor."

Whereupon the Speaker announced: "The Secretary of Labor is recognized for five minutes."

W. B. Wilson was appointed the Secretary of Labor, and by many it is said his was the "big job" of the Cabinet. The new department took over from the old Department of Commerce and Labor the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, and the Children's Bureau. "It has power to act as mediator and arbiter in labor disputes whenever it is deemed necessary for the establishment of industrial peace. It can put an end to the slavery existing in many of the industries today, in mines and in lumber camps, and in the steel plants, where every alternate Sunday men work twenty-four hours from sun-up to sun-up. It can see that the law restricting child labor is rigidly enforced. Today over 1,700,000 children under fifteen work ten and twelve hours a day and sometimes all night in fields and factories and mines and workshops. It can decide whether government by injunction can be enforced always in the interest of capital and never in the interest of labor." Verily this is a "big job."

CHAPTER XV

CREATING THE DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

SUGGESTIONS and proposals for the Department of Labor appear to have been urged continuously since the Civil War. They were so numerous and persistent over the long period intervening between the earliest of them and its creation as to indicate a steadily strengthening popular demand for some such act of Congress as that under which this Department operates.

In 1865 a department of the Federal Government with reference to the welfare of wage earners, and with a Secretary in the President's Cabinet to speak for them, was advocated by prominent labor leaders. Their suggestions appear to have been officially adopted in 1865 by labor organizations of that period.

Probably the only earlier proposal in any wise of similar character was that of a bill introduced in Congress in 1864 by the Hon. Gottlieb Orth, then a Representative from Indiana, for the creation of a "Department of Industry." Numerous formal measures bearing on the subject were proposed in Congress from that time forward during the following forty years or more.*

*More than a hundred bills and resolutions anticipating the present Department of Labor and introduced between 1864 and 1902 are summarized in pages 13-21 of the public document entitled "Organization and the Laws of the Department of Commerce and Labor," published by the Government Printing Office in 1904 and now out of print.

In 1867 Congressional action was secured, but only on a resolution instructing the Committee on Rules to inquire into the expediency of the creation of a standing labor committee.

Some of the measures introduced in Congress, both before and afterward, were more intimately related to the commercial and business side of industrial affairs than to the wage-earning side. Others, however, distinctly anticipated the present Department of Labor and its principal functions.

Among the latter was a bill, passed by the House of Representatives in 1871, for the appointment of a commission on the subject of wages and hours of labor and the division of profits between labor and capital in the United States. There were also bills for establishing a "Bureau of Labor," a "Labor Bureau in connection with the Department of Agriculture," a "Bureau of Labor, with a Commissioner of Labor, a "Bureau of Labor Statistics," a "Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Interior Department," and a "Department of Industry." None of the bills was enacted. But several others of similar tenor and purpose, introduced at the first session of the Forty-eighth Congress (1883-84), were followed in 1884 by preliminary legislation in the direction of the present Department of Labor.

Among those bills was one in the Senate for a "Bureau of Labor Statistics," introduced by Senator Blair. In the House there was one for a "Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industries," by Representative O'Neill; one for a "Department of Labor Statistics," by Representative McKinley (afterward President); one for a "Department of Industry," by

Representative Foran; and one for a "Bureau of Labor Statistics," by Representative Lamb. Out of these an act was framed. As a result, therefore, of twenty years of agitation for a department of the Federal Government representative of the interests of wage earners, this act, approved June 27, 1884, created a bureau in the Department of the Interior by the name of the "Bureau of Labor.'

That original Bureau of Labor was transformed in 1888 into an independent department by the name of the "Department of Labor," with a Commissioner of Labor as chief, but he was not of sufficient rank to be called into the Cabinet by the President. This Bureau of Labor, as it was again called, was placed in 1903 under the jurisdiction of the Department of Commerce and Labor.

Meanwhile, the original agitation for a Department of Labor with a Secretary of Labor in the President's Cabinet continued. In 1885 Representative Weaver introduced a bill for an executive Department of Labor with a Secretary of Labor. General Weaver's bill was referred to the Committee on Labor and got no farther; but during the next eighteen years several bills having the same or a similar purpose were introduced. At the end of that time substantial legislative progress was made.

In form these bills were of considerable variety, although their purpose appears to have been much the same. Some were in title quite like some of those introduced during the period preceding the creation of the original Bureau of Labor. Among them were bills to establish, respectively, a "Department of Agriculture and Labor," a "Department of Industry