The Pennsylvania in accordance with its expressed home-rule principle held that the employees elected as shop-craft representatives must be bona fide workers upon the pay-rolls of the Pennsylvania railroad. The shop-crafts union leaders claimed the right to have the names of the local organization officers appear upon the ballots. The national headquarters of the shop-crafts union also made loud protest. It appealed to the Railroad Labor Board, which deliberated ponderously upon the crisis and then ordered the Pennsylvania to proceed toward a new election, this time along national and not along individual shop lines. The Pennsylvania protested against the Labor Board's ruling. Its protest was not heeded. The board after a rehearsing stood by its decision. Then the Pennsylvania appealed to the courts, where the entire matter is at present ensnarled. The railroad is loud in its protestations that it is not attacking the Railroad Labor Board as an organization; that it merely is seeking to keep it within the bounds laid down by the intent and purpose of the remarkable Transportation Act, which, in the long run, may come merely to a fine use of words. The other railroads have not as a rule joined with the Pennsylvania in this protest. On the contrary they have proceeded rather rapidly in conforming to the Labor Board scheme, by joining in groups to set up local courts of arbitration with their men in various large centers of the land. Is this because they have loved the Labor Board idea? I hardly think so. I think that the real reason is because they have realized that in the difficult hour of transition from governmental to private operation--and, consequently the almost inevitable lowering of wages--the Railroad Labor Board, and the Railroad Labor Board almost alone, stood between the nation and a general and calamitous strike of transportation workers. This of course was before the coming of the industrial slump and the release of several million workers into the labor market. It was a real factor in helping to prevent the strike in October, 1921, which so many of the railroad executives really wanted and which the railroad workers, knowing from the outset that they would be beaten, did not want. For these things alone the Railroad Labor Board probably has been worth all this cost--and the cost has not been small. Yet that there could not be a more direct pathway to them than the creation of a brand-new expensive political commission I shall always deny. I have shown the direct short cut that Great Britain took in railway wage adjustment. Is it inconceivable that the United States might not occasionally take a short cut of her own in these labor situations? Was the creation of another political board an absolute necessity?