course it could not affirmatively force his service, but could it not compel by a penalty a reasonable respect for the circumstances of his employment? For every man who voluntarily undertakes employment with an interstate carrier, as manager or operative, possesses duties as well as rights. He can not escape the obligations which attach to his employment by its very nature. I have no doubt that the State, in the exercise of its police power, as Congress, in the exercise of its commerce power, could compel a reasonable recognition of the obligations of employment where sudden quitting endangered the life of persons who, by the circumstances of his job, depended for their safety upon the reasonable performance of some step in a task before the employee quit. The circumstances of all our social life make us each at times dependent for our safety upon the completion of some act by another, and we have all become utterly dependent upon the maintenance of that motion which constitutes commerce and upon which we are abjectly dependent for the transaction of the business of life.

Now, if Congress declared that the concerted quitting of employment by the operatives of an interstate carrier pending an investigation of a dispute between them and their employers was unlawful, what is the nature of the step which Congress has taken? It has in no way affected the right of the individual to sever the contract relation. It has not prohibited, but it has merely conditioned the right to combine to quit. I submit that every one of the many cases presented in the inferior and supreme courts of the United States vindicating the power of Congress under the Sherman Act to condition, qualify, and prohibit all right of combination in interstate commerce speaks with an emphatic voice in favor of the authority of Congress to condition a combination of employees to quit the service of interstate carriers as a means of securing some demand from their employers. Whether Congress conduct the inquiry for which it provided, through the Interstate Commerce Commission, or made it an added power of the Commissioners of Conciliation or Mediation, or provided in each case a separate commission of inquiry is merely a matter of policy or expediency. But, as to the power of Congress, certainly every case from Gibbons v. Ogden to the last utterance of the Supreme Court on the subject, and especially those numerous cases which arose during the railroad strike of 1894, state in the broadest terms the supreme plenary exclusive power of Congess to prevent or remove any obstruction to the movement of commerce, whether it be physical or economic, a mob, a sand bank, or a monopoly, a group of employers or a group of employees. Surely, if the regulation of a sovereign State is swept from the pathway of commerce, Congress, in the language of Justice Brewer, can prevent "any mere voluntary association" from paralyzing that commerce as a means of enforcing or bettering its contract of service.

In dealing with this very power you have recently gone so far as to say that Congress may say to the manufacturer in any State: Unless you make your local contract of employment within certain inhibitions you shall not ship your product in interstate commerce, for in the protection of that commerce we shall exclude from it any commodity, however sound in itself, which has been produced under local conditions we believe affect public health or public morals.

Personally I can not doubt that you possess the power to either exclude or condition the right to combine in interstate commerce when the purpose and necessary effect or one of the methods of such combination contemplates the suspension, obstruction, or prevention of the operation of a necessary instrumentality of commerce. Whether you shall exercise that power to the limit by prohibiting combination or whether you shall partially exercise it by conditioning its activity is a matter for your discretion. But I have no doubt, Mr. Chairman, that you could not compel any individual to remain at work against his will, except for such reasonable period as was necessary to compel some task the quitting of which endangered life. In the exercise of that power, with respect of an individual, the sole question would be whether or not the regulation of individual liberty was a reasonable exercise of power in the protection of a legitimate public interest, and such an exercise of power would be easily distinguishable from any effort to compel involuntary servitude. All the "peonage" cases to which reference has been made here arose under statutes in which a man was involuntarily compelled to work out a debt, and in such cases the statute was so shaped as to involuntarily urge him into debt as well as to compel him to involuntarily work it out. The inhibition placed by the thirteenth amendment does not run against reasonable restraint of private conduct in the public interest, but forbids involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Emery, you have exceeded your time limit. I presume whatever you would say further would be simply an elaboration of what you have stated, and you can put quotations of these decisions in the record, if you choose.

Mr. EMERY. Very well, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Easley, it is necessary for you to go out of town to-day? I wish to give you the floor, Mr. Furuseth.

Mr. FURUSETH. I shall defer to Mr. Easley.

Senator CUMMINS. Before you proceed with Mr. Easley, I would like to say that if it is convenient to Mr. Emery, at some future time may want to ask him a question or two. I do not want to arrest the proceedings now, because I know Mr. Easley wants to leave town.

I

Mr. EMERY. I will be glad to be here at any time you suggest. Senator CUMMINS. It may be that I will want to get some further information from you.

Mr. EMERY. With your permission, then, Mr. Chairman, I shall briefly sum up. I have undertaken to suggest that the proposal of the President applies only to the right to act in combination and not to individual conduct. That it is an extraordinary remedy for an extraordinary situation, and proposes only that when a labor dispute between the employees and managers of an interstate carrier has failed of settlement through mediation and conciliation, and arbitra · tion is refused, it shall be unlawful for either party to the controversy to strike or lockout until an inquiry has been made into the merits of the controversy through a commission authorized for that purpose. I submit that the effect of this proposal is to condition, not to prohibit, the right to combine to quit, and that the purpose for

which such power is exercised is one well within the powers of Congress, to prevent the use of the power of combination to obstruct or prevent the interruption of the service of an interstate carrier as a means of securing the enforcement or betterment of a contract of service.

I submit that it is the duty as well as within the power of Congress to protect the country against an interruption of interstate. service, upon which its social life is utterly dependent, through the act of a combination. That in the course of 26 years of congressional legislation dealing with combinations operating in commerce between the States Congress has asserted and has been sustained in the right to condition, exclude, and penalize all forms of combination threatening the safety, the freedom, and the free flow of every form of commercial intercourse between the States.

I submit, finally, that Congress can suffer no division of its power to regulate commerce with any other authority, whether it be a sovereign State or an irresponsible voluntary association. Yet it is evident that when Debs undertook to prevent 27 railroads from hauling Pullman cars, or when the brotherhood in the Ann Arbor cases undertook to prevent the railroads upon which they were employed from handling the cars of a carrier with which their members were on strike, that these combinations undertook to fix the rule of interstate commerce for the objects of their attack. Had they succeeded in their effort, the commerce which they permitted would have been conducted under the law which they established and not the rule which Congress made. The issue here is not merely whether Congress can condition the operation of a combination the necessary effect and purpose of whose activity is the paralyzing of the service of an interstate carrier, but whether Congress, not merely as a matter of right but of duty, can tolerate the organization and maintenance of any combination which can at its will, as a first or as an ultimate argument for the acceptance of its demands, possesses the power and asserts the right to starve a Nation into becoming the unconscious partners to its demand by stopping the instrumentalities of social intercourse until that demand, whether just or unjust, is granted. The final issue is whether or not Congress possesses and should exercise the ultimate power of social self-defense in the domain of interstate

commerce.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Easley, you may now proceed.

STATEMENT OF MR. RALPH M. EASLEY, CHAIRMAN OF THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF THE NATIONAL CIVIC FEDERATION.

Mr. EASLEY. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, my name is Ralph M. Easely, chairman of the executive council of the National Civic Federation.

I am not appearing officially speaking, for the National Civic Federation. I will read just one paragraph at the close of my statement here which will explain that better. In what I am saying I am only voicing my own sentiments. The National Civic Federation has not officially passed upon the question, although in earlier days the officers of the organization, from Mr. Low down, were all opposed to either compusory arbitration or compulsory investigation. This statement, Mr. Chairman, was not prepared to read before

this committee, but as a part of an address I am to make next week in New York, but I am only dealing with the operation of the Canadian act as I find it in their own reports.

In the present controversy over the Canadian compulsory investigation act, which act Congress is considering as a means, to quote its advocates, for preventing a recurrence of a threatened railway tie-up in this country, there are several very important points generally overlooked.

First, and most important, it will not prevent a recurrence at all; it was not intended to prohibit strikes, and it does not prevent them in Canada. It is only intended to delay them until after a board has heard both sides of the issue and made a public recommendation. Then either side or both sides, which has happened in Canada time and again, can go ahead and fight it out. This fact can be easily ascertained by examining the recent report of the conciliation board of the labor department of Canada, which purports to give the history of every case that has come before the board since the enactment of the law growing out of disputes in the railway, municipal utility, and mining interests of Canada, and their employees, mining being classed as a public utility in the law.

However strongly one may feel that the paramountcy of the public right and interest in an uninterrupted service of public utilities should be maintained at all hazards, however strongly one may feel that the railway brotherhoods, in threatening to paralyze the traffic of the country, were wrong and deserve drastic legislative treatment, as it has been said, to teach them that the public has right as well as they, there is no use in fooling ourselves about "securing a prevention of a railroad strike" in this country by adopting the Canadian act. Personally, I feel that the railway brotherhoods should have accepted the proposals of the railway managers for arbitration, notwithstanding their great disappointments in previous arbitration, and notwithstanding the acknowledged serious defects inherent in all arbitration where the public representatives on the board have the deciding voice. Also, I believe in the paramountcy of the public interests; but that has no bearing on the question as to whether the Canadian compulsory investigation act is the vehicle. through which the public voice can be made effective. It is not a question of sentiment, but a question of fact.

A proposition that might work well in Canada with its almost homogeneous population of 7,206,643 does not throw much light on what will work in a country of 100,000,000 population composed of over 40 nationalities. When we consider that Greater New York and vicinity has a larger population than the whole Dominion of Canada, comparing problems in Canada to those in the United States seems a little grotesque.

Parenthetically it might be recalled that some years ago we were flooded with wonderful ideas of the successful operation of the novel and so-called progressive legislation in New Zealand, and the Socialists, single taxers, and other radicals in the country started at once a movement to "New Zealandize" the United States. Well, these beautiful dreams, even in little New Zealand, which is only one-sixth as large as Canada, and whose population is even more homogeneous, there being only 823 aliens, have been smashed to

smithereens; and if there is any country more chaotic in its industrial situation than New Zealand, it is not on the latest maps available at this writing. Furthermore, a commission composed of employers, labor leaders, and publicists is now on its way to the United States to learn from us how to get out of their mess.

The official reports of the board of conciliation to the Labor Department of Canada on the operation of the compulsory-investigation act from its enactment, 1907 to 1916, although written by offieials who are trying to make it seem as important and successful as possible, and which conceals a number of very important facts that the average reader would never discover, furnished enough information to dissipate all beliefs that an industrial Utopia has been developed by our numerically speaking little neighbor on the north.

In the whole nine years of its existence it dealt with disputes involving only 146,000 employees, and 32,000 of them, or nearly 22 per cent, struck in spite of the award, and in many instances in spite of the law itself, striking before making any application. Nothing in the record shows that any effort was made to inflict the penalties of the law upon them by fining or sending them to jail.

Much is made by advocates of a statement in the reports that out of 191 disputes there were only 20 strikes. An examination of the report referred to shows that that means very little. There are dozens of little "Jim Crow" strikes, running from 4 to 100 employees 63 cases to be exact-which would have been settled by any voluntary mediation board, but under the law the cumbersome and costly machinery of the National Government had to be invoked for the 4, the 6, and the 10 employee class as well as in cases of real consequence. There are 109 cases, with 250 employees and less; while the largest number in any one case involved was 8,000, and they struck.

As against that record, under the Newlands Mediation Act, which has no compulsory powers, out of 74 railway disputes 73 were settled by mediation or arbitration, and in several instances the employees numbered more than all the railroad, municipal utility, coal mines, and other employees dealt with by the Canadian board in the whole nine years of its existence.

The United States Department of Labor reports 300 cases, 275 of which were adjusted, this without any power whatever. Furtherinore, the board being a Federal one, and most of the cases having to do with State industries, either side could have politely asked them to tend to their own business. But their services were gladly accepted.

There are twice as many disputes, involving five times as many employees, settled by voluntary boards in New York City every year, as in all the disputes under the Canadian compulsory investigation act during its life.

But let us examine a few of the strike cases that are referred to in the official Canadian report and see if we can find anything worth copying in the United States, for all the arguments for the adoption of this measure here are based upon a general feeling that its operation in Canada has been a phenomenal success and is the answer to the question: How can we, in the United States, insure ourselves against the danger of a paralysis of the traffic of the country.