This went on for two weeks; then Secretary Lane, the acting chairman of the Conference, appealed to a very sick President, and from his bed Woodrow Wilson begged us not to allow division on one point to destroy our opportunity: At a time when the nations of the world are endeavoring to find a way of avoiding international war [he wrote], are we to confess that there is no method to be found for carrying on industry except in the spirit and with the very method of war? Must suspicion and hatred and force rule us in civil life? Are our industrial leaders and our industrial workers to live together without faith in each other, constantly struggling for advantage over each other, doing naught but what is compelled? My friends, this would be an intolerable outlook, a prospect unworthy of the large things done by this people in the mastering of this continent; indeed, it would be an invitation to national disaster. From such a possibility my mind turns away, for my confidence is abiding that in this land we have learned how to accept the general judgment upon matters that affect the public weal. And this is the very heart and soul of democracy. But it was too late. The labor body walked out, except a few railroad men, wise and experienced in negotiations. A group of employers followed them. It was defeat. There was nothing for the President to do but disband the Conference. He did ask, however, that the public group of some twenty-five carry on. Now this group included a number of extraordinarily able men. From them had come some of the wisest and broadest suggestions that had been placed before the Conference. They could have presented an impressive program, but they had been outmaneuvered. They lost heart; they refused to go on. The only remarks I made at that Conference, bewildered as I had been by the political maneuvering, were when I saw the public group prepared for the cowardly business of denying the President’s request. “Let us stick to it, do our best, make some report,” I pleaded. But I do not think anybody heard me. I had an impression as I talked that most of them were calculating when they could get a train to New York. My next adventure in Government service came two years later as a member of President Harding’s Unemployment Conference. The country had been caught in the first great postwar depression, and nobody was ready for it. Nobody knew, indeed, how widespread the unemployment was. Mr. Harding called a conference to deal with the problem without attempting to find out. The result was that on one hand you had an opposition belittling the numbers, on the other hand you had the responsible sponsors of the Conference probably exaggerating them. Nobody knew. And how easy it would have been to find out, by the same method the country had used in the War when, by a cooperative effort, the number of draftable men was counted in twenty-four hours at a limited expense!