In the old days in New Jersey, now happily gone, the days when the granting of special corporation charters was the vogue, a sort of political suzerainty was set up by Railroad and Public Service interests. Every election was, in its last analysis, a solemn referendum upon the question as to which corporate interest should control legislation— whether the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose master mind was the Republican leader of the state, United States Senator Sewall, or the Public Service interests, whose votaries and friends were Senator Smith of New Jersey, and Milan Ross, Sr., of Middlesex County. While these corporate interests fought among themselves over the matter of a United States senatorship or the governorship of a state, they were at one in their unrelenting, bitter, and highly organized opposition to the passage of what in this day we call by the highly dignified name of Social Welfare Legislation. The voices of those liberal-minded men and women of the state, who, year after year, fought for this legislation, were like voices crying in the wilderness. An illustration of corporate opposition was the unrelenting attitude of the Special Interest group of the state to the passage of the Employers' Liability Act. Every decent, progressive, humane man in the state felt that the old, barbaric, Fellow-Servant doctrine should be changed and that there should be substituted for it a more humane, wholesome, modern doctrine. Nearly every state in the Union had already recognized the injustice of the old rule, but the privileged interests in New Jersey could not be moved in their bitter and implacable opposition to it, and for over half a century they had succeeded in preventing its enactment into law. Progressives or New Idea Republicans, high in the councils of that party, had fought with their Democratic brethren to pass this legislation, but always without result. At last there came a revolt in the Republican party, brought about and led by sturdy Republicans like Everett Colby of Essex, and William P. Martin of the same county; George Record and Mark M. Fagan of my own county, Hudson. Out of this split came the establishment in the ranks of the Republican party itself of a faction which called itself the New Idea branch of the Republican party. The campaign for humane legislation within the ranks of the G.O.P. was at last begun in real fighting fashion. It was the irrepressible conflict between the old and the new, between those who believed human rights are superior to and take precedence over property rights. The conflict could not be stayed; its leaders could not be restrained. These men, Colby, Record, Martin, and Fagan, were the sowers of the Progressive seed which Woodrow Wilson, by his genius for leadership and constructive action along humane lines, was soon to harvest. His candidacy, therefore, admirably fitted into the interesting situation.