2 APRIL 1927, Page 16

AMERICAN LABOUR CONDITIONS

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,--I was interested to read a letter in your issue of March 26th, signed " H. C.," on the question of relations between Capital and Labour in the United States. He points out that although relations are so good at the present time, until quite recently the I.W.W. held sway with their vicious class-war methods, *put into force by dynamite, the club, the gun, and the knife. I am inclined to think that the real reasons for the change in relations is due mainly to the efforts of one man—the late Mr. Samuel Gompers—that grand old man of American Labour, who incidentally was an Englishman, and who cleansed the American Labour Movement of " wob- blies," anarchists and communists, and made the American Federation of Labour one of the finest Trade Unions in the world.

The class war agitators are still within the American Labour Movement, as evidenced in the recent strike of Passiac textile workers, but official American Labour fights the efforts of the disrupters on every possible occasion. It is a lesson that might well be carried out by the Labour Movement in Great The Economic League, 2 Millbank House, Millbank, London, S.W. 1.