dealing with labor conditions, to overhaul the machinery for negotiation and legal adjustment, and to get at the causes which bring employer and employee to the clash and provoke aggression from either hand. For enough has been said to show that the public's problem is not merely that of an outraged umpire in a struggle between two contending forces in our economic life. It goes deeper. For larger and larger groups of Americans it is becoming the problem of their relations as a free, self-governing people to the industrial corporations in and through which they obtain their livelihood. In one of the pamphlets issued by the committee which secured the creation of the commission, it was said :

We have not as yet squarely faced this mighty shifting in the economic foothold of the democracy. They [industrial corporations] are becoming the permanent basis on which much family life and citizenship depend. This is truer today than it was ten years ago, truer ten years ago than it was twenty, truer in number of people so engaged, and in the size of these industrial units. It will be truer ten years from now than it is today.

Writing as chairman of the committee, Mr. Devine said:

A "durable" question, is the expressive phrase in which Lincoln summed up the issue of slavery. This being interpreted means that it was a struggle which was not to be settled in a day but must be stayed by and followed from phase to phase." The industrial warfare similarly presents to us a "durable" question. That is not by any means the same thing as an endless or insoluble problem. The physical conquest of the American continent was a "durable" struggle, but its geographical phase is ended in our own generation. The abolition of poverty requires a "durable" struggle, but it is within sight of sober and responsible statesmanship. The "durable struggle" as to whether this nation was 66 to ultimately become all slave or all free" reached its" final and rightful result" within less than ten years after Lincoln's defeat by Douglas which called forth the defeated candidate's clear formulation of the issue.

It took the stress of civil war, four score and more years after the nation was brought forth, to remove the flaw which the founders of the Republic had allowed to mar the relations

between land and labor. With that war the United States, hitherto an agricultural country, entered upon its period of industrial development.

Fifty years later a group of forward-looking men and women challenged American statesmanship to give sober consideration to the relations between corporate industry and labor, not necessarily in the belief that any such deep-seated flaw as human slavery exists, or that war is necessary to remove it, but with the profound conviction that the revolutionary economic changes of the half-century have put new and unusual strains upon the personal rights and governmental forms which have been handed down from earlier times, and that it is the especial task of our generation to develop an industrial procedure that will readily and naturally lead to justice and fair dealing in the same way that earlier centuries saw the slow evolution of a civil society conceived in liberty.

The Commission on Industrial Relations is a response to that challenge. Upon it Congress has laid the responsibility for such a public and resourceful scrutiny of all the facts, that before we enter upon any partial or fragmentary solutions, the situation may be seen as a whole and understood of all men. PAUL U. KELLOGG.

NEW YORK CITY.

REPUBLICAN CONVENTION REAPPORTIONMENT

N all discussion about the rehabilitation of the Republican party the most insistent demand is for the readjustment of the party machinery to render it truly representative of party membership. I have more than once called attention to this weak spot in our system of president-choosing, growing out of the overweighted delegations from the southern states which can boast but paper organization, and which contribute no electoral votes to the Republican column. Recognizing the defect, it would seem easy to apply the remedy merely by proclaiming a new basis of representation proportioned to the popular vote registered for the party standard-bearers. But the problem is by no means so simple as it looks on the surface. Nor is it easy to unite behind any substitute plan those who admit the unfairness of the present apportionment.

The complaint against the disproportionate representation in determining Republican presidential nominations is not new; nor have previous efforts to correct the apparent abuse been wanting. The obstacles in the way, however, have not yet been successfully surmounted; nor is it reasonable to expect that the arguments heretofore advanced to perpetuate the existing delegate distribution will be withdrawn now, and the beneficiaries consent without protest to a reformation that to them will be equivalent to self-effacement. To give proper perspective to this subject, it must be treated from two viewpoints: first, the historic origin and subsequent evolution of the present apportionment; and second, the various remedies proposed, the differences between them, and the results which might be expected from them. All consideration of the subject must, of course, assume that we are to continue our president-choosing, at least for the immediate future, by the mechanism of convention nominations and electoral-college balloting, and that nominations by a nation-wide presidential primary and election by direct popular vote are still more or less remote.

1

1 American Review of Reviews, March, 1908; also same magazine March, 1911.

I.

The first national convention of the Republican party, which met in Philadelphia in 1856 and nominated John C. Fremont for president, assembled in response to a call emanating from the chairmen of a number of state free-soil organizations who had previously met in Pittsburgh to outline a plan for a national movement. This call invited "the people of the United States without regard to past differences or political divisions" who favored the principles and policies set forth "to send from each state three delegates from every congressional district and six delegates-at-large." We have, therefore, at the very inception of the party two essential elements of party policy proclaimed: the dual representation of states and congressional districts, and the equality of representation of the several geographical units. This arrangement appears to be a wholly natural development from established precedent. Nomination of presidential candidates by delegate conventions had been preceded by nomination by caucuses of the members of the two houses of Congress belonging to the respective parties. In Congress each state is represented by senators and each separate congressional district has its own representative. The representation in Congress, furthermore, had a counterpart in the representation in the electoral college, except that the electors, when not appointed by the legislatures, were chosen at large more frequently than by districts.

Had any different disposition been manifested at that time, it would still have been difficult, if not impossible, to have adopted a rate of representation proportioned to party membership, because no test of party strength was available, since no Republican candidates had been entered in any previous presidential contest. The only question that could then have been raised in this connection was whether any particular state or district was entitled to be represented at all—a question that goes to the fundamentals of the whole controversy. Should a delegation from irrevocably slave states be admitted to a convention built on free soil and free men? And if admitted, should such delegations have the same voice and vote as a delegation sent by a northern constituency many times as numerous and

ready and able to do yeomen service in the cause? It is interesting to note that this issue was precipitated in the very next convention, the convention which first nominated Abraham Lincoln, and that the debate then evoked nearly all of the arguments pro and con that have since been brought to bear on it. It seems that when the credentials committee reported the list of delegates by states with the number of votes accredited, a motion was made to recommit that part relating to the delegation from Texas; to which, amendments sought to add the states of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky, the territories of Nebraska and Kansas, and the District of Columbia. The result was that the whole report was finally recommitted. The brunt of the attack against the admission of delegations representing dubious constituencies was borne by David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, of Wilmot Proviso fame, who put the case thus prophetically:

I cast no imputation upon the gentlemen who have come here to this convention. I have full confidence in their integrity and in the earnestness and zeal with which they are enlisted in the cause; but, sir, in another convention that may assemble here, gentlemen may come from South Carolina, from Arkansas and from Mississippi for the express purpose of controlling, demoralizing and breaking up the Republican party. Now, sir, if this is not stopped, there is no help for us. The true policy of the Republican party is to allow all its members a voice, bet in proportion to their numbers.

Again in reply he asked: Will the distinguished gentleman from New York, a candidate before this convention, or his frends, corsent that they be overslaughed or defeated by the votes of gentlemen representing to party, by gentlemen having

no constituents?"

Let me quote brief selected excerpts from the objections and appeals interposed on the other side:

Mr Ewing of Pennsylvan a retorted to Mr. Willmot: “I de precace the sentiment of my frend trom Pennsylva We al come here as Republicans and those men who come bere fre de sacs named deserve ten times as a cada those who came tere firm the free states.'