C. W. Perry, who came from Marshall, Texas. Perry had learned the trade of a machinist and had worked in the railway machine shops until the white machinists struck and made it so uncomfortable that the negro machinists went out. Then he went on the railway as brakeman, where he worked for fifteen years. He owned his own home and was well respected, so much so that when it became known that he intended to leave, several of the County Commissioners called on him. "Why are you going away?" they asked; "you have your home here among us. We know you and you know us. We are behind

you and will protect you."

"Well," he replied, "I have always had an ambition to do something for myself. I don't want always to be led. I want to do a little leading."

Other immigrants, like Mr. T. R. Ringe, the Mayor, who was born a slave in Kentucky, and Mr. E. L. Lugrande, one of the principal stockholders in the new bank, came out in the new country, like so many of the white settlers, merely to get land. Mr. Lugrande came from Denton County, Texas, where he had 418 acres of land. He had purchased this land some years ago for four and five dollars the acre. He sold it for . fifty dollars an acre, and, coming to Boley, he purchased a tract of land just outside the town and began selling town lots. Now a large part of his acreage is in the center of the town.

Mr. D. J. Turner, who owns a drugstore and has an interest in the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, came to Indian Territory as a boy, and has grown up among the Indians, to whom he is in a certain way related, since his brother

married an Indian girl and in that way got a section of land. Mr. Turner remembers the days when every one in this section of the Territory lived a half-savage life; cultivating a little corn, and killing a wild hog or a beef when they wanted meat. And he has seen the rapid change, not only in the country, but in the people, since the tide of immigration turned this way. The negro immigration from the South, he says, has been a particularly helpful influence upon the "native" negroes, who are beginning now to cultivate their lands in a way which they never thought of doing a few years ago.

A large proportion of the settlers of Boley are farmers from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi. But the desire for Western lands has drawn into the community not only farmers, but doctors, lawyers, and craftsmen of all kinds. The fame of the town has also brought, no doubt, a certain proportion of the drifting population. But behind all other attractions of the new colony is the belief that here negroes would find greater opportunities and more freedom of action than they have been able to find in the older communities North or South.

Boley, like the other negro towns that have sprung up in other parts of the country, represents a dawning race consciousness, a wholesome desire to do something to make the race respected; something which shall demonstrate the right of the negro, not merely as an individual, but as a race, to have a worthy and permanent place in the civilization that the American people are creating.

In short, Boley is another chapter in the long struggle of the negro for moral, industrial, and political freedom.

T shall be unlawful for any employer to declare or cause a lockout, or for any employee to go on strike, on account of any dispute prior to or during a reference of such dispute to a Board of Conciliation and Investiga tion."

Such is the fiat of the exasperated Canadian public, weary of the anarchy of industrial warfare. We on this continent have been slow to realize that we were more than spectators in the gladia torial contests of capital and labor, priv ileged at most to cheer on one of the contestants, or to hold thumbs up when the weaker was sorely pressed. The realization of an interest more direct has come at last. It is a commonplace of thinking to-day that, whichever side wins in an industrial struggle, that tertium quid, the public, always loses. But that realization has rarely crystallized into action. The shibboleth of individual liberty has stayed our hand. We might advise, persuade, even provide voluntary boards of conciliation, but hesitated to command. It needs the suffering from a coal strike or a railway tie-up to social ize our thinking, to convince us that the hazardous interdependence of the mod ern industrial organism carries with it an obligation on all those assigned to the pivotal posts not to desert for private ends. Adam Smith might look to his famous "invisible hand" to keep strag glers in line, but we "who are now our own Providence "must utilize the rudely tangible and visible hand of social legis lation.

Canadian law-making in this field has gone through an interesting evolution. In 1900 the Dominion Government was led by the growth of industry and of industrial strife to create a Department of Labor and pass a Conciliation Act. This measure was based on the mild British act of 1896, and contained the usual provisions for intervention on the request of one of the parties to a dis

pute by a conciliator or board of conciliation appointed by the Minister of Labor. Owing to the energy of the Department officials rather than to the amplitude of their powers, this law has met with more than the average success attaching to such voluntary measures.

The

A stubbornly contested strike of trackmen on the Canadian Pacific, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, soon revealed the law's limitations. In 1902 Sir William Mulock, then Minister of Labor, and one of the most progressive men in Canadian public life, suggested a further step. He submitted to Parliament a bill providing for compulsory arbitration in railway disputes. The bill was given only a first reading, as it was avowedly put out as a feeler. The general public proved sympathetic but skeptical. railway authorities did not make themselves publicly audible. But the labor unions would have none of it. The Trades and Labor Congress passed resolutions to the effect that the proposed measure would "rob the railway employees of their constitutional rights, destroy their organizations, and place them absolutely in the hands of railway companies, at the same time depriving them of that citizenship which is so dearly prized and is the inherent right of all freeborn British subjects."

The bill was dropped at the following session, and in its stead was passed the Railway Disputes Act of 1903. The essential feature of this measure was compulsory investigation. The Minister of Labor was empowered, when a strike or lockout seemed imminent, to constitute on his own motion a board of conciliation, consisting of one member chosen by the employees, one by the railway, and a third co-opted or appointed by the Department. Failing in their efforts to bring the disputants together, they were to be reconstituted as a board of arbitration, to conduct an investigation with full court powers, and issue a report,

No attempt was made to prohibit strikes or lockouts. The force of public opinion, it was hoped, guided and focused by impartial investigation, would suffice to bring the morally weaker side to terms before serious damage had been inflicted. Whether because of the restraining influence of this Act, or, as seems more probable, because of the yielding temper prosperity has made possible to the railways, there has been since 1903 only one serious railway dispute, up to this year.

In that case-a conflict between the Grand Trunk and its telegraph operators-the Act was invoked, and, after a somewhat dilatory investigation, marked by an overscrupulous adherence to legal formalities. a settlement was finally effected without a day's stoppage of work.

The next advance was also the outcome of concrete difficulties rather than of any abstract aspiration for wellrounded legislation. A nine months' strike in the coal mines at Lethbridge, Alberta, the chief source of fuel for the western prairie country, brought on widespread hardship last winter, intensified by the unusual severity of the weather and the frequent blockading of railways. The West is not so content as Ontario or Nova Scotia to suffer meekly, and Ottawa was bombarded with telegrams insisting on immediate action. Mr. Mackenzie King, the Deputy Minister of Labor, was despatched to the scene of conflict, and by his tactful energy brought both sides to a realization of the gravity of the situation, and finally to agreement. On his return to Ottawa he recommended that the provisions of the Railway Disputes Act be extended to cover coal mines, with the further important proviso that strikes and lockouts should be prohibited pending investigation.

In the United States such a report would have been hopelessly pigeonholed, or, if formulated in a bill, silently bill, silently smothered in committee year after year. But in Canada the path from public opinion to legislation is a smoother one. Power is more centralized in the Federal Government. The courts have never been allowed to usurp an impeding dominance. Cabinet government concentrates both authority and responsibility.

The Dominion is not blest with that curiously cumbrous and unbusinesslike system of checks and balances, that organized anarchy of senate versus house versus executive fastened on the United States by constitutional fathers who shied at democracy. Convince a single man— for Sir Wilfred Laurier is to-day the Liberal party, and the Liberal party controls Parliament two to one-convince him that any measure is expedient and is demanded by public opinion, and a single session will suffice to translate that public sentiment into law. So in the present instance. The Minister of Labor, the Hon. Rodolphe Lémieux, introduced a bill along the lines recommended, and, with some extensions and curtailments, it became law in March.

Surprisingly little opposition was offered in Parliament. Whatever division of opinion exists in Canada on social questions cuts athwart party lines rather than along them. Liberal and Conservative are phrases out of which all color has been washed-mere respectable synonyms for the Ins and the Outs. A dryrot of indifference, a lack of broad issues more paralyzing than open corruption, has pervaded Canadian politics ever since the present dominant party stole its opponents' clothes, although signs of a healthy revival are now multiplying. Mr. Borden, leader of the Opposition, and perhaps the most earnest and studious of Canadian politicians, not only welcomed the bill but urged that the Government should go the whole road to compulsory arbitration.

The scope of the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act, or the Lémieux Act as it is more popularly known, is wider than first contemplated. It applies to all mines, railways, telegraphs and telephones, and public service utilities. The constitution and powers of the board of conciliation are the same as under the Railway Disputes Act. Failing an agree ment, the board must issue a report, to which the Department gives widest publicity, setting forth specific recommendations for a just settlement. Employers or employees must give at least thirty days' notice of proposed changes in hours or wages. Prior to or pending inquiry all strikes or lockouts are forbidden,

under penalties ranging from one hundred to one thousand dollars a day in the case of employers, ten to fifty for employees, and fifty to one thousand for any one inciting to strike or lockout. The Government does not assume the duty of punishing violations of the Act, but legal machinery is provided which any aggrieved party may set in motion.

The essence of the measure, it will be seen, is compulsory suspension of hostilities pending investigation. Conciliation is tenfold more difficult after hostilities have openly broken out; passions are inflamed, positions have been taken from which pride forbids retreat; the original cause of the dispute is forgotten in the new grievances which friction develops. Yet altogether to forbid recourse to the ultimate weapon of strike or lockout is scarcely possible in fluid, individual, complex America; from compulsory arbitration the road leads steep and slippery to government regulation of wages, assizes of bread, and actions against forestallers, engrossers, regraters, and ye other troublers of the common weal. The Canadian compromise protects the public without doing violence to "the natural rights of free-born British subjects." It insists first on exhausting all possibilities of settlement. Then, if conciliation fails, either party is at liberty to reject the solution proposed and strike or lock out to heart's content. In nine cases out of ten the public disapproval of the side which rejects a fair compromise can be relied on for speedy settlement. The tenth may be offered up on the altar of individual freedom.

The Act has been in force eight months, too short a period to provide a final test, but sufficient to permit some tentative conclusions. It has been invoked in a score of disputes, reaching from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, and involving a wide range of issues. And in the light of this experience the consensus of opinion is that its success, while not unqualified, is undeniable. Whatever future industrial legislation is passed in Canada will start from this new level.

The most marked success achieved by the measure has been in the railway field. Within less than a month after its enactment the machinists in the em

ploy of the Grand Trunk road applied for a board of conciliation. The dispute was a particularly complex one, comprising differences as to hours, wages, shop rules, and reinstatement of a portion of the men who had been on strike or locked out over a year. A board was at once constituted, consisting of Wallace Nesbitt, K.C., a leading Toronto lawyer, representing the railway; J. G. O'Donoghue, solicitor of the Trades and Labor Congress, nominated by the machinists; and Professor Adam Shortt, of Queen's University, selected by the Minister of Labor as Chairman. Three sessions spent in investigation enabled the board to allay the irritation felt by both parties to the dispute, and to bring each to a sympathetic understanding of the other's position. The resulting agreement was a compromise, though, as the Chairman notes in his report, "no attempt was made to settle difficulties on the easy but demoralizing principle of splitting the difference; every attention was given to deciding each matter on its merits." Mr. C. M. Hays, General Manager of the Grand Trunk, and other leading officials of the road, who had at first been opposed to the board's intervention, attended all the sessions, and expressed themselves at the close of the proceedings as thoroughly convinced of the practicability of the new law. Practical evidence of their satisfaction was afforded when shortly afterwards the Grand Trunk took the initiative in referring to conciliation a dispute with the locomotive engineers of the company which had been the subject of almost daily but fruitless conferences for over two months. Here again the deliberations of the board, consisting of Professor Shortt, Mr. Nesbitt, and Mr. Cardell, were crowned with success. An agreement on all rules and rates was drawn up for three years.

A more difficult problem was presented by a dispute between the Canadian Pacific and its telegraph operators. Rumblings of a strike that would tie up the whole system had been heard all summer. The men were strongly organized and officered, and demanded very substantial concessions, including a twenty five per cent increase in wages.

As the wages paid were already higher than on any other railway on the continent, the company stood firm in refusal. During September the operators applied for a board of conciliation, to which Messrs. Shortt, O'Donoghue, and Nesbitt were chosen as before. Great difficulty was experienced in reaching a settlement, and at one time the outlook was so pessimistic that preliminary strike orders were issued by the executive. Finally, however, the strenuous efforts of the arbitrators succeeded, to great public relief. Their decision, which was accepted by both parties, granted an increase of fourteen per cent in the payroll, but refused other concessions demanded by the men.

Inevitably the Act was at first regarded with intense suspicion in many labor circles, particularly in the Rocky Mountain mining district. While it was being passed through Parliament a dispute was being waged between the Western Coal Operators and the United Mine Workers over the terms of renewal of the annual contract. No agreement was reached, and early in April the men applied for intervention. A board was at once appointed, with Sir William Mulock as Chairman. Unfortunately, some legal quibbling by the operators over technical irregularities in the men's application confirmed the latter's suspicions that the board was to be used as a pretext for delay. Before investigation was begun the men went on strike, or rather, in their own fine distinction, they "quit work;" as the officials of the union were opposed to the action, and no strike pay was given, it was perhaps not technically a strike. Without waiting for the board to take action, Deputy Minister King intervened, and, after explaining the provisions of the Act to the men, many of whom were foreigners, succeeded in inducing them to return to work under a two years' agreement granting a slight increase in wages. Provision was made for the establishment of a permanent joint committee of miners and operators. As Chairman of this committee, the Minister of Labor has recently selected the Rev. Hugh R. Grant, the original of Ralph Connor's Sky Pilot. While the success achieved in this case is to

be credited chiefly to the Department's men rather than its measures, there is no doubt that the prospect of an investigation contributed powerfully to bring both sides to terms.

Mr.

The soundness of the faith placed in the power of an informed public opinion was well illustrated in a longshoremen's dispute in Montreal during May. Under the apprehension that the Act did not apply to them, about fifteen hundred longshoremen struck for higher wages. F. A. Acland, Secretary of the Department, explained its provisions to the men, and a week after striking they returned to work and applied for a board of conciliation. The board, of which Archbishop Bruchesi was Chairman, recommended that half the increase demanded by the men be granted unconditionally, and the other half as a bonus conditional on remaining at work all season. The longshoremen's union rejected the settlement. Their action immediately alienated the good will of press and public, by whom the settlement was regarded as eminently fair, and under the force of their disapproval the men were compelled to capitulate after two or three days' resistance.

The acceptance of the Act is compulsory only on quasi-public industries. Provision is made, however, for the inclusion of other lines of industry if both parties to a dispute so agree. A strike in the cotton mills of Valleyfield, Quebec, involving over two thousand employees, gave opportunity for the application of this provision. The good offices of Messrs. Acland and De Breuil, of the Department of Labor, led to a temporary agreement under which work was resumed and the chief matters in dispute referred to a board of conciliation. The board reached a satisfactory conclusion on the existing grievances, and provided for the reference of future troubles to a local committee.

In the opposite scale to these successes must be weighed several instances of failure. The most important arose out of a dispute in the Cumberland coal mines at Springhill, Nova Scotia. The machinery of the Act was duly called into play; a board of conciliation was appointed, made an investigation, and