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i ' i j 1 1 1 mmmmvmmmmmmmmmm AMERICA, TO BE EFFICIENT IN WAR, MUST DEAL FAIRLY WITH LABOR, SAYS GOMPERS BY SAMUEL GOMPERS, President of the American Federa tion of Labor. (Copyright, 1917, by the Newspaper Enterprise Association.) Despite our every endeavor, each day seems to make war more inevi table. Under these conditions it be comes the -great task of the Ameri can labor movement to demonstrate to the world that democracy can be efficient in war, even as it is in peace. The more democratic countries of the world have always proved them selves the most efficient and progres sive in the pursuits of peace, as was first demonstrated by the American colonies when they broke away from the leading strings of Great Britain. It is now our duty to show the world that in war also the same superiority can be maintained. In this movement to make democ racy efficient in war, the labor move ment must take a leading part, even as it has played the lead in every other democratic movement in the world's history. It is from the ranks of labor that the armies are recruited and organ ized. It is labor's power that makes it possible to create the great ma chinery and the endless supplies of munitions which the prosecution of modern warfare demands. And it is only through the untiring harmoni ous action of labor that the armies as well as the civil population are fed, clothed and transported. Democracy can be efficient only when it is united. When there is discontent, dissatis faction and discord within the ranks of democracy its power is crippled and dissipated. Production lags and the vigor of the entire industrial life is impaired wherever there is a force at work creating disunion, dissension and disloyalty. The greatest obstacle to the dem onstration in America of democra cy's superior efficiency is the fact that there are strong forces at work in this country creating dissension and distrust of the very government behind which we must unite if our purposes are to be attained. In pointing out these forces which are making for distrust of govern ment, I do not refer to the propagan da of any enemy country, nor to the mouthings of misguided agitators, but to those forces, always inimical to the people, which under cover of this critical time in which we are now living are attempting to deprive the people, and particularly the working people, of their most funda mental rights and to impose upon them much of what is worst in the most hated autocracies of Europe. In the state of New York, under cover of false patriotism, the most reactionary forces in America are banded together in an attempt to create a cossack constabulary, with which the rights of the workers can be as ruthlessly trampled upon as they have been under a similar sys tem in Pennsylvania. In Colorado, the declaration by wage-earners that they would exer cise their constitutional right to strike despite the law of the state which denied them that right has been branded as treason by the sin ister forces which control that state'3 government. Here in the capital of the nation there is hardly a bill providing for the defense of the nation which has not had cleverly concealed within it clauses whose intent was to reduce the. workers to the status of serfs or to deprive them of their most fun-' damental rights. Fortunately; organ ized labor has been awake to these menaces and so far has been able to prevent their enactment And now the supreme court of the United States, in its decision on the Adamson act, by interpolating into J