Sincere as was the desire of the President to create amicable relations between capital and labour and equally sincere as was the attitude of the majority of the participants to the Conference to reach an understanding that would reduce to a minimum the danger of industrial disputes and establish a satisfactory method of settling them when they did arise, it was obvious from the outset that the Conference would be abortive; that a panacea for industrial ills would not be discovered by it. It was unfortunate that illness prevented Mr. Wilson from taking personal charge of the proceedings. The influence of his high office might have prevented the disagreements that occurred and held the Conference together long enough to enable the participants to arrive at some basic points of agreement. But this was not to be. It was also unfortunate that the Conference took place during a big industrial dispute, probably the greatest the country had ever faced. For although it was obviously convened to deal with industrial problems in the abstract rather than in the concrete, Samuel Gompers and the other union representatives at the very beginning demanded that one of its first actions should be the settlement of the steel strike. This might readily have been foreseen. The labor leaders undoubtedly, by the time the Conference came together on October 6th, realized that in their conflict with the Steel Corporation and the steel companies generally they had engaged in a losing fight. At the very time strikers in large numbers were going back to the mills and the operations of the steel companies were steadily increasing. The continuation of the fight meant a total loss to the unions while arbitration would have permitted them to gain some of their points, or at least to yield gracefully and save their faces. They saw, or thought they saw, in the Industrial Conference, a means to force the Corporation to accept arbitration. Defeated in their efforts to end the steel strike without sacrificing prestige among their followers with the assistance of the Industrial Conference, the labor leaders then made another demand--that the Conference, before proceeding further, recognize the principle of collective bargaining and the right of workers to be represented by men of their own choosing. This demand, fair as it seemed on the face of it, was so presented as to make it clear that by “collective bargaining” was meant bargaining through unions, and that by “representatives of their own choosing” was meant union leaders selected not by the men but by unions, and the employers insisted that, while the right of collective bargaining could not be gainsaid, the unions must recognize the exercise of this right through shop committees, a form of collective bargaining which has proved successful in many instances but to which unionism is firmly and irrevocably opposed. [Illustration: Coils of Red Hot Wire]