The compulsory law of New Zealand has found no favor in this country. The hearings before the recent Industrial Commission show that the representatives of both employers and workingmen gave testimony against compulsory arbitration. The employers object because, they claim, it would be one-sided owing to the lack of responsibility on the part of the workingmen, while the workingmen object because, they claim, it would be manipulated to suit the employers, and, if enforcement carried imprisonment, it would provide for a species of slavery intolerable in a free country. Many state boards, however, while not advocating as a whole compulsory arbitration, urge further legislation which shall prevent public inconvenience and loss resulting from strikes and lock-outs involving public service corporations and means of transit. This condensed summary of the general features of the question brings us logically to a consideration of the method or methods best suited to our time and country. Since the great majority interested on both sides, employer and employed, reject any system of arbitration which includes compulsion in its composition, experiments must be along the line of mutual concession and tactful persuasion. Such results may be hoped for, and, perhaps, confidently expected in the system of mediation and conciliation promulgated by the Industrial Department of the National Civic Federation. That brings me up to date. I do not propose to treat this question from an academic standpoint, but to give an expression of my own experience, having been a large employer of labor for more than thirty years, and having studied that question from the standpoint of mutual interest. My attention was strongly directed to this subject as far back as 1874, at the end of one of the most severe and destructive strikes that ever occurred in Northern Ohio, in the coal mines, long and protracted, bitter and destructive. When it was over both sides had suffered, and it occurred to me that there ought to be some other way to settle these differences, and as a result of that we organized in Northern Ohio an organization of employers, the mine owners, and the men organized what was known then as the National Bituminous Coal Miners’ Association, the first of that character ever organized in the United States. Their constitution and by-laws provided that no strikes should occur until every other effort in the right should fail, and the employers covenanted that they would give hearings and consideration to any committees sent to them by the union. As a result, during the life of the organization on the part of the men, there never was a serious strike. All differences, which with small beginnings very often lead to disastrous strikes, were settled by the employer and employee coming together with a proper spirit, with a determination to do right. Upon that hypothesis I have been working ever since, and from that day to this I have never had a serious strike.