In order that any kind of labor legislation shall be enacted, it is necessary (so far as we have a government by public opinion) for a majority of the public to be convinced that the conditions are such as call for governmental interference. It becomes so convinced in two broadly distinguishable classes of cases: one, when the masses of unorganized workers are too weak to secure for themselves conditions of work and wages consistent with health and morality; and the other, when strong bodies of organized workers, in their attempts to win their ends in an industrial dispute, exceed their private rights and invade the public welfare. § 16. #The public and compulsory arbitration#. Where the railways are owned and operated by the state (as is now the case pretty generally except in America and Great Britain) the question of the "right to strike" arises from time to time, in critical forms. The logic of the situation compels even those officials that are of the labor party or are most favorable to labor, to maintain an uninterrupted service on the public railways. The experiences of that nature in France and in Australasia have been notable. Nowhere in the United States has the principle of compulsory arbitration been adopted, but at the time of the great anthracite strike, in 1902, public sentiment grew strong in favor of it. As a result of the intolerable conditions in the mines of Colorado was passed the compulsory investigation act of 1915 in that state. In 1916 the threat of a general railroad strike brought from many quarters strong expressions of condemnation in principle, of the strike as a method of settlement of wage disputes on the railroads. And in the end the organized laborers themselves accepted, apparently with much satisfaction, a law involving the legal fixation of wages and the principle of compulsion as applied to the employers. [Footnote 1: By the Secretary of the American Federation of Labor.] [Footnote 2: See Vol. I, pp. 458-467.] [Footnote 3: For example, increase less than 25 per cent per hour in changing from a 10 hour to an 8 hour day.] [Footnote 4: See above, ch. 6, sec. 12.] [Footnote 5: See especially, sec. 8.] [Footnote 6: At this writing the case, Bunting vs. the State of Oregon, is still undecided.] [Footnote 7: Published as "The case for the shorter working day," by the National Consumers' League, see especially pp. 621-892.] [Footnote 8: See Vol. I, pp. 135 and 197.] [Footnote 9: Much public regulation of wages occurred in Europe until near the end of the eighteenth century. In England this was done mainly by the justices of the peace and, in the main was directed toward limiting the demands of the wage-workers.] [Footnote 10: See below, sec. 15.] [Footnote 11: By the act of 1888, the Erdman act of 1898, superseded by the Newlands act of 1913, and supplemented by measures for mediation by the Department of Labor.]