Of greatest importance to her was winning the support of organized labor. Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, had already shown his friendliness toward equal pay and votes for women and was putting women organizers in the field to speed the unionization of women. Even so she was surprised at the enthusiasm with which she was received at the American Federation of Labor convention in 1899, when the four hundred delegates by a rising vote adopted a strong resolution urging favorable action on a federal woman suffrage amendment. So far as possible she had always established friendly relations with labor organizations, first in 1869 with William H. Sylvis's National Labor Union and then with the Knights of Labor and their leader, Terrence V. Powderly.[424] When Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union, was arrested during the Pullman strike in 1894 for defying a court injunction, she did not rate him, as so many did, a dangerous radical, but as an earnest reformer, crusading for an unpopular cause. They had met years before in Terre Haute, where at his request she had lectured on woman suffrage, and immediately they had won each other's sympathy and respect. She did not see indications of anarchy in the Pullman and Homestead strikes or in the Haymarket riot, but regarded them as an unfortunate phase of an industrial revolution which in time would improve the relations of labor and capital. That women would be effected by this industrial revolution was obvious to her, and she wanted them to understand it and play their part in it. For this reason she saw the importance of keeping the National American Woman Suffrage Association informed on all developments affecting wage-earning women and to her delight she found three young suffragists wide awake on this subject. One of them, Florence Kelley, had joined forces with that remarkable young woman, Jane Addams, in her valuable social experiment, Hull House, in the slums of Chicago, and was now devoting herself to improving the working conditions of women and children. She represented a new trend in thought and work--social service--which made a great appeal to college women and set in motion labor legislation designed to protect women and children. Another young woman of promise, Gail Laughlin, pioneering as a lawyer, approached the subject from the feminist viewpoint, seeking protection for women not through labor legislation based on sex, but through trade unions, the vote, equal pay, and a wider recognition of women's right to contract for their labor on the same terms as men. Her survey of women's working conditions, presented at a convention of the National American Association was so valuable and attracted so much attention that she was appointed to the United States Labor Commission. Harriot Stanton Blatch also understood the significance of the industrial revolution and woman's part in it, and she too opposed labor legislation based on sex.