Commission On Municipal Ownership And Operation

Excerpt from Municipal and Private Operation of Public Utilities: Relative to the Labor Report of the National Civic Federation, Commission on Public Ownership and Operation To Samuel Gompers, President American Federation of Labor: Being accountable directly to you, since you mainly were responsible for me, in the municipal ownership inquiry, I address these pages first of all to you. You, as the foremost trade-union official of the labor group in the National Civic Federation, presided at the conference at which I was made a member of the Committee of Twenty-One on Investigation and the Labor member of the Committee of Five on Plan and Scope. Whether or not you named me, you were doubtless consulted before I was placed on these committees. Besides, the trials of comradeship had settled in you some confidence in me. On being informed that I had further been appointed one of the two investigators of labor conditions, you wrote mo: "I felt that no man in my wide range of acquaintance was better fitted than you to undertake a thorough, dispassionate, and impartial investigation and to report the results as you found them." When you thus wrote we had been associated in the labor movement half a lifetime. On many occasions you had shown that, you placed reliance on me in serious work. You yourself nominated me at a convention of the. American Federation of Labor so that I became one of its two delegates in 1896 to the British Trade Union Congress at Edinburgh. Through you the Executive Council made me General Lecturer on Initiative and Referendum in the years 1892-95. You have repeatedly commended my writings on labor subjects during the last twenty-five years, appointed me on leading committees at conventions and conferences, and have invited me to preside at important Labor or public meetings. Our relations have invariably been such that, whatever our differences as to policies, you have never ceased for a day to manifest your expectation that on undertaking a task I would end it with a report satisfactory at least in exhibiting fair endeavor. It must, then, have arrested your attention when you read in my colleague's review his strictures on the character of my work white I shared his duties. You could only have felt dissatisfied thereafter in not finding anywhere in the voluminous reports of the Commission any reply whatever from me to this attack. According to my fellow-investigator 1 had in my review done what to him was "impossible." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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