ent.
In the autumn of 1918 Gompers went to Europe and participated in an
Inter-Allied labor conference. He refused, however, to participate in
the first International Labor and Socialist Congress called since the
War, which met at Berne, Switzerland, in March 1919, since he would not
sit with the Germans while their country was not formally at peace with
the United States. The convention of the Federation in June 1919 gave
complete endorsement to the League of Nations Pact worked out at
Versailles,--on general grounds and on the ground of its specific
provisions for an international regulation of labor conditions designed
to equalize labor standards and costs. Contrasting with this was the
position of British labor, which regarded the Pact with a critical eye,
frankly confessing disillusionment, but was willing to accept it for the
sake of its future possibilities, when the Pact might be remodelled by
more liberal and more democratic hands.

The contrast in outlook between the mild evolutionism of the American
Federation of Labor and the social radicalism of British labor stood out
nowhere so strongly as in their respective programs for Reconstruction
after the War. The chief claim of the British Labor party for
recognition at the hands of the voter at the General Election in
December 1918, was its well-thought-out reconstruction program put forth
under the telling title of "Labour and the New Social Order." This
program was above all a legislative program. It called for a
thoroughgoing governmental control of industry by means of a control of
private finance, natural resources, transportation, and international
trade. To the workingmen such control would mean the right to steady
employment, the right to a living wage, and the appropriation of
economic surpluses by the state for the common good--be they in the form
of rent, excessive profits, or overlarge personal incomes. Beyond this
minimum program loomed the cooperative commonwealth with the private
capitalist totally eliminated.

Such was the program of British labor. What of the Reconstruction
program of American labor? First of all, American labor thought of
Reconstruction as a program to be carried out by the trade union, not by
the government. Moreover, it did not see in Reconstruction the great
break with the past which that meant to British labor. The American
Federation of Labor applied to Reconstruction the same philosophy which
lies at the basis of its or