he food, clothing, and shelter of the whole people.

For the purpose of meeting the issue raised by this state of affairs, it
was suggested that employers and employees should lay their disputes
before commissions of arbitration for decision and settlement. President
Cleveland, in a message of April 2, 1886, proposed such a method for
disposing of industrial controversies, and two years later Congress
enacted a voluntary arbitration law applicable to the railways. The
principle was extended in 1898 and again in 1913, and under the
authority of the federal government many contentions in the railway
world were settled by arbitration.

The success of such legislation induced some students of industrial
questions to urge that unions and employers should be compelled to
submit all disputes to official tribunals of arbitration. Kansas
actually passed such a law in 1920. Congress in the Esch-Cummins railway
bill of the same year created a federal board of nine members to which
all railway controversies, not settled by negotiation, must be
submitted. Strikes, however, were not absolutely forbidden. Generally
speaking, both employers and employees opposed compulsory adjustments
without offering any substitute in case voluntary arbitration should not
be accepted by both parties to a dispute.

IMMIGRATION AND AMERICANIZATION

=The Problems of Immigration.=--From its very inception, the American
Federation of Labor, like the Knights of Labor before it, was confronted
by numerous questions raised by the ever swelling tide of aliens coming
to our shores. In its effort to make each trade union all-inclusive, it
had to wrestle with a score or more languages. When it succeeded in
thoroughly organizing a craft, it often found its purposes defeated by
an influx of foreigners ready to work for lower wages and thus undermine
the foundations of the union.

At the same time, persons outside the labor movement began to be
apprehensive as they contemplated the undoubted evil, as well as the
good, that seemed to be associated with the "alien invasion." They saw
whole sections of great cities occupied by people speaking foreign
tongues, reading only foreign newspapers, and looking to the Old World
alone for their ideas and their customs. They witnessed an expanding
army of total illiterates, men and women who could read and write no
language at all; while among those aliens who could read few there were
who knew anything of American histor