President Wilson in his recent address to Congress, in his accurate, authoritative way, laid great stress upon this very point of arbitration. He had laid stress upon it in the crisis of September, 1916--when it looked as if railroad union labor and the executives of the railroads had come to an actual parting of the ways--and the country was to be turned from threats into the terrorizing actuality of a strike. Only Congress, which seems rarely able to realize that it can ever be anything else than Congress and so bound to its traditions of inefficiency, chose to overlook this portion of the President's solution of the situation. It granted the eight-hour day--so called--but it was deaf to arbitration. Said President Wilson in his address: To pass a law which forbade or prevented the individual workman to leave his work before receiving the approval of society in doing so would be to adopt a new principle into our jurisprudence, which I take it for granted we are not prepared to introduce. But the proposal that the operation of the railways of the country shall not be stopped or interrupted by the concerted action of organized bodies of men until a public investigation shall have been instituted which shall make the whole question at issue plain for the judgment of the opinion of the nation is not to propose any such principle. The President is nearly always right--particularly so in domestic affairs. But never, in my knowledge, has he expressed himself with greater vigor and strength than in this particular instance. Not that the principle is apt to be popular--quite the reverse is probable. There are employers of a certain type, also employees of a certain type, whose bitterness against any fair measure of arbitration is unyielding. The great railroad brotherhoods have never shown any enthusiasm over the idea, despite the fact that the two countries in which arbitration is strongest and most successful--Australia and New Zealand--are controlled by organized labor. There are railroad executives also who have been opposed to arbitration save where they might manipulate it to serve their own selfish ends. But these are the types of railroad chiefs who are beginning to disappear under the new order of things in America. Theirs was another and somewhat less enlightened generation--particularly in regard to social economics. And even in the railroad the old order is rapidly giving way to the new. There is a class in America which enthusiastically receives arbitration--compulsory arbitration--and demands that it be extended in full to the railroad, as well as to every other form of industrial enterprise. I am referring to the average citizen--the man who stands to lose, and to lose heavily, while a strike of any magnitude is in progress. He is an innocent party to the entire matter. And he must be protected--absolutely and finally.