remain indefinitely in the lead unless most of his followers are with him. Mere force of personality will accomplish wonders for a short time, but it is incredible that for forty years Gompers could have maintained his government of the Federation without the full consent and agreement of the mass of the governed. If Gompers was the American Federation of Labor, the Federation was in the main also Gompers.

Labor unions are divided into a variety of types. As against the industrial union, joining all the workers in a single industry regardless of their several crafts, Gompers was a firm believer in the trade union, made up of the workers in a single craft, and in a Federation bringing these workers together on the basis of their individual forms of labor.

True trade-unionists [he declared, in terms which he never modified,] are those wage-workers, members in good standing of the union of the trade or calling at which they are employed, who realize as a fundamental principle the necessity of unity of all their fellows employed at the same trade or calling; who recognize the vital, logical extension, growth, and development of all unions of all trades and callings; and who strive for the unity, federation, coöperation, fraternity, and solidarity of all organized wage-earners; who can and do subordinate self for the common good and always strive for the common uplift; who decline to limit the sphere

of their activity by any dogma, doctrine, or ism. Finally, those organized wage-workers are true trade-unionists who fearlessly and insistently maintain that the trade unions are paramount to any other form of organization or movement of labor in the world.

Here is a positive statement of a positive theory. When the American Federation of Labor entered the field, the Knights of Labor, an organization of considerable magnitude and power, was undertaking, as Gompers saw it, "to make one organization of all classes of labor." He expressed well his objection to this scheme of organization when he said, "It would be just as impractical for purposes of achieving anything in the interest of the working people as it would be if applied to the different divisions of men in an army corps, perhaps cavalrymen, artillerymen, infantrymen, foot and horse soldiers, all being mixed up in a great potpourri. Chaos and confusion would reign if an order were given it to advance."

The Knights of Labor fell also into the classification of the "uplift union," with radical and utopian aims. The American Federation of Labor is, on the contrary, a "business union," based upon taking things as they are and, by pursuing policies which have often seemed equally radical to extreme conservatives and conservative to ex

treme radicals, to press at one point after another for the gradual improvement of conditions. For a few years the Knights, led by Terence V. Powderly, and the Federation, led by Gompers, were at swords' points. Now for many years it has been necessary to say, in significant condensation of what occurred, the Knights were, the Federation is.

To suggest the starting-point from which the Federation set out on its pilgrimage it is worth while to enumerate seven of the fourteen points of proposed legislation recommended by the Committee on Platform at the convention which formed the Federation of Trades and Labor Unions in 1881. These were: compulsory education laws, prohibition of labor of children under fourteen years, sanitary and safety provisions for factories, national eight-hour law, prohibition of contract convict labor, protection of American industry against cheap foreign labor, and laws prohibiting importation of foreign workers under contract. There was also from the first a strict determination to abstain, as an organization, from party politics. "We must be partisan for a principle," said Gompers, "and not for a party"; and in the constitution of the Federation itself it is written that "party politics, whether they be Democratic,

Republican, Socialistic, Populistic, Prohibition, or any other, shall have no place in the conventions of the American Federation of Labor." In practice the general plan of the regular trade unionist, politically, has been to reward the friends and punish the enemies of his cause. This has not been inconsistent with the constant, organized exertion of pressure on State Legislatures and Congress for the enactment of laws favorable to labor. The adoption of the national Eight-Hour Law of 1912, the creation of a Department of Labor in 1913, and the passage of the Clayton Anti-Trust Law in 1914 were conspicuous fruits of this effort. The principles of the "trade agreement" by "collective bargaining," of coöperation with the National Civic Federation, representing the employer class, and of the organization of women's trade-unions, have taken their place with many other objects of endeavor in the general programme. The total record of arrivals at clearly defined objectives between 1881 and the present time is substantial to a degree that could hardly have been contemplated at the beginning.

All this called for strong qualities of personal leadership, organization, and administration. Gompers possessed these qualities in abundance. A lover of life and men, of broad sympathies with