ust, and attempted
without success to bring them to an agreement. A program to which he
eventually gave his approval provided for the concession by the
employers of the basic eight-hour day, with other issues left over
until the working of this proposal could be studied. The railroad
executives refused this, and while the negotiations were thus at a
deadlock it became known that the brotherhoods had secretly ordered a
strike beginning September 4. To avert this crisis the President asked
Congress to pass a series of laws accepting the basic eight-hour day,
providing for a commission of investigation, and forbidding further
strikes pending Government inquiry.

None of these proposals except the eight-hour day, the center of the
whole dispute, met the approval of the brotherhoods, and none of them
except the eight-hour day and the commission of investigation was
adopted. But, with A. B. Garreston, of the Brotherhood of Conductors,
holding a stopwatch in the gallery, Congress hastily passed these laws
and the strike was called off.

The eight-hour issue was the last item on the record on which President
Wilson came up for re-election in the Fall of 1916. Despite the
single-term plank in the Democratic platform of 1912, it had been
evident long before the end of Mr. Wilson's first term that he was the
only possible candidate. In March, 1913, he had seemed almost like an
outside expert called in for temporary service in readjusting some of
the problems of public life; he was by no means the leader of the
party. But long before Bryan resigned in alarm at the tendencies of a
foreign policy over which the Secretary of State had no control the
President had become the leader of the party, and by 1916 he was almost
the only leader of prominence.

In the record on which the electorate was to express its judgment only
a minor place was taken by the issues which had seemed of such
importance in 1913. The Federal Reserve Act had already proved its
value so well that it was being taken as a matter of course, and people
were forgetting that they had ever had to depend on a currency which
ran for cover in every crisis and on a banking system where each bank
was a source of weakness to its neighbors instead of strength. What
effect the Underwood-Simmons Tariff and other measures of the first
year might have had on American business no man could say, for
conditions created by the war had left America the only great producer
in a world