he adoption
of an eight-hour day. The matter came some three weeks ago to a final
issue and resulted in a complete deadlock between the parties. The means
provided by law for the mediation of the controversy failed and the
means of arbitration for which the law provides were rejected. The
representatives of the railway executives proposed that the demands of
the men be submitted in their entirety to arbitration, along with
certain questions of readjustment as to pay and conditions of employment
which seemed to them to be either closely associated with the demands or
to call for reconsideration on their own merits; the men absolutely
declined arbitration, especially if any of their established privileges
were by that means to be drawn again in question. The law in the matter
put no compulsion upon them. The four hundred thousand men from whom the
demands proceeded had voted to strike if their demands were refused; the
strike was imminent; it has since been set for the fourth of September
next. It affects the men who man the freight trains on practically every
railway in the country. The freight service throughout the United States
must stand still until their places are filled, if, indeed, it should
prove possible to fill them at all. Cities will be cut off from their
food supplies, the whole commerce of the nation will be paralyzed, men
of every sort and occupation will be thrown out of employment, countless
thousands will in all likelihood be brought, it may be, to the very
point of starvation, and a tragical national calamity brought on, to be
added to the other distresses of the time, because no basis of
accommodation or settlement has been found.

Just so soon as it became evident that mediation under the existing law
had failed and that arbitration had been rendered impossible by the
attitude of the men, I considered it my duty to confer with the
representatives of both the railways and the brotherhoods, and myself
offer mediation, not as an arbitrator, but merely as spokesman of the
nation, in the interest of justice, indeed, and as a friend of both
parties, but not as judge, only as the representative of one hundred
millions of men, women, and children who would pay the price, the
incalculable price, of loss and suffering should these few men insist
upon approaching and concluding the matters in controversy between them
merely as employers and employees, rather than as patriotic citizens of
the United States look