OCR Text |
Show GOMPERS PRAISES PRESIDENT'S HELP WHILE ON SICKBED BALTIMORE, Oct. 23. Samuel Gom-pers, Gom-pers, president of tho American Federation Feder-ation of Labor, was given a tremendous ovation when ho appeared tonight before the United Textile Workers, in convention conven-tion here. Mr. Gompcrs urged tho tex-tilo tex-tilo workers to pursue their aims calmly and avoid overreach tug" themselves. Referring Re-ferring to the employers' group at tho Washington conference, while condemning condemn-ing their course, he laid most of the blame not on the actual employers in the group, but upon their lawyers. "I am reliably informed," he said, "that it was the lawyers in the employers' employ-ers' group who cast the majority of the votes in that group in conference against the declarations of labor." He argued that it was useless for the labor group to continue in tho conference confer-ence after labor's declaration had been rejected. While the vote of the labor group could have prevented tho views of the employer group from being adopted, it could have done no more, he said, and it would have been useless to stay in the conference merely to cast negative votes. Mr. Gompers spoke appreciatively of the letter sent the conference by President Presi-dent Wilson, asking that it stay in session ses-sion until it had composed its views and formulated a policy. "The president's letter." said he, soberly, "written from his chamber, where he was flat on his back, was a wonderful document. It will live as one of his greatest labors, not only because of what it contained, but because of the circumstances under which it was written. writ-ten. Of course, we could not be adamant ada-mant against such an appeal. We retired re-tired to confer, made concessions and came before the conference a lmost confident con-fident the president's desire could be approved." |