My active interest in the industrial life of the country brought me unexpected adventures. The most instructive as well as upsetting was serving on a couple of those Government conferences which twentieth century Presidents have used so freely in their attempts to solve difficult national problems. An Industrial Conference called by President Wilson for the fall of 1919 was the first of these. Mr. Wilson felt clearly at the end of the War that our immediate important domestic problem was to establish some common ground of agreement and action in the conduct of industry. What he wanted evidently was a covenant by which employer and employee could work out their common problems as cooperators, not as enemies. There was need of action, as any one who remembers those days will agree. The whole labor world was in an uproar, and one of the periodical efforts to organize the steel industry was under way. Mr. Gompers, the head of the American Federation, sponsoring the strike, had had little or no sympathy with a contest at the moment but had been pushed into it by the adroitness of the radical elements boring from within throughout the War. “These disturbances must not go on. It should be possible to make plans for a peaceful solution,” Mr. Wilson said. And so a Conference was called. In spite of my refusal to serve on his Tariff Commission, President Wilson had evidently not given me up. As a matter of fact our acquaintance and mutual confidence had grown during the War. He now named me as one of four women representatives, the others being Lillian Wald, head of the Nurses’ Settlement in New York City, Gertrude Barnum, assistant director of the investigation service of the United States Department of Labor, and Sara Conboy of the textile workers’ union. The Conference was an impressive and exciting body of some fifty persons divided into three groups representing the public, labor, the employers. I, of course, sat in the first group, where I found as my colleagues a bewildering assortment of men from various ranks of life. There were Dr. Charles Eliot, Charles Edward Russell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Judge Gary, John Spargo, Bernard Baruch, Thomas L. Chadbourne, Jr., and a score or more less known to the public, though not necessarily less influential. At the head of the labor group was Samuel Gompers. Among his colleagues were some of the most experienced labor leaders in the country. The members of the employer group were chosen from among men who had been particularly helpful in directing their industries during the War.