THE INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE.

Patriots may well view with alarm the break in the National Industrial Conference at Washington. It is an event of grave moment in American affairs and may not be dismissed with a word and a hope. Labor has withdrawn from the conference muttering; the representatives of the public seem to side with labor; capital sits tight; and the country waits to see how badly it is to be ground between the upper and the nether millstones.

Responsibility for the split seems to rest entirely upon the shoulders of the capital group, for it was in that body that the majority was found to kill labor's resolution recognizing the right of collective bargaining. All along capital has said that if they could only sit down and talk it over with labor, everything would be all right. When the show-down came, it was capital that started the "scuttling" tactics.

It cannot be that the world is too small for both capital and labor to exist in it at once. The two are complementary. Fair and equable relations between them must be possible. During the war labor gave much; capital promised much. Now that war is over, labor, willing to compromise on many questions and expecting like concessions from the other side, meets, capital. But capital, which has swallowed far bigger pills in its day, refuses recognition of collective bargaining a principle under which it has been tacitly working many years. This principle labor cannot abandon without losing all for which it has fought so long.

It is to be hoped that all chance of concord is not gone, for the threat of Mr. Gompers is ominous: "We will meet you again . . . and when we do . . . you will be glad to talk collective bargaining."