The following day the Steering committee met in the morning, the railroad presidents, unbending, left for their various headquarters to prepare for the strike, and that night (Sunday) the president did an unprecedented thing. It was a stormy night, the rain descending in a torrent, and the Finance committee was at work in the room in the basement of the capitol. Suddenly the capitol police, who had deserted the entrances to the capitol for their own room in the basement, were startled by the appearance of the president at their door. He had left the White House in his machine in the storm in search of Senator Kern. The senator was summoned from the committee room, and in the gloomy basement corridors the president and the senator began a conference which ended in the president’s room off the senate chamber after a janitor had been found to open the door. It was that night that President Wilson announced that he would hold the congress in session until the needed railroad legislation was enacted. On Monday morning the conference of the president with senators took place in Kern’s private room, 249 Senate building. A second conference was held in the same room during the crisis--a history-making conference--at which the president’s line of action was outlined and adopted. The needed legislation was enacted on September 2, the country was spared the most disastrous industrial conflict in its history, and the country will not soon forget the remarkable indifference of the railroad presidents to the public’s interest. Throughout this crisis Senator Kern played a more important part than appeared upon the surface. His popularity with organized labor made it possible for him to bring some influence to bear upon their attitude, and he was kept in touch with all the conferences of the men through reports submitted to him after each meeting by men participating in them. During the last two years and more of his leadership Senator Kern was greatly concerned with the international situation as it related to the world war. He hated war. He understood the frightful meaning of the struggle should conditions force us in. While not a member of the committee on Foreign Relations, he was in the confidence of the president and knew of the conditions that were tending to make war inevitable to a self-respecting people. So passionately was he opposed to war that he had little patience with Americans on pleasure bent insisting on traveling unnecessarily--through the war zone. He recognized their legal right to do so but was intolerant of their indifference to the possible effect upon the peace of a hundred million people. And yet he supported every move made by the president as justified by the insane policy of Berlin. “The condition is hell,” he wrote a friend in January, 1916. “The cyclone may hit us within a few weeks. Nothing short of a miracle can stop it. I have been up against some pretty knotty propositions, but nothing like this.”