Labor is not entitled to any special privileges in its contribution to the winning of the war, but it is entitled to a square deal. Good wages and fair hours--long hours and hard work, all this is no more than what our boys are joyfully, cheerfully giving in camp and at the front. But Uncle Sam is doing everything in his power to make life wholesome and clean for these boys and the country has responded with unexampled generosity to every appeal. This is splendid and what it should be.

Contrast this with the condition of mechanics who are giving equally of their best to win this war. They are not given even decent conditions under which to do their work. They rush to the yards and the factories in response to the call and find not only no place provided for them to live, but no protection from the sharks who take advantage of the demand for rooms and houses to raise all the cost of living. It is no wonder that we have a disastrous turn-over of labor. Nor is anything done to protect and care for their ordinary needs, nothing for their women and children for the social side of their life.

For six months the men have heard talk of housing and, in not a few cases, it is a local real-estate boom, or builders with something to sell, or some interested concern that is talking loudest, and they feel, not unnaturally, discouraged after these landlord experiences. And all this time nothing is really done. The men endure, the work goes on, but it drags and every day the call from the other side is more insistent. This is something that no Y. M. C. A., no Knights of Columbus, can handle: neither State nor City can do it, only the Government can. For it means war measures, taking land, fixing prices, and holding them, preventing land-speculation and every other form of robbery and injustice which in the end comes back on labor; it means building houses, schools, hospitals, theatres and churches; giving its workers as it gives its fighters the best conditions possible for the special job they have to do. The Government has at last set up the agency to do this, and put good men in charge. Let every man who has the winning of this war at heart push this work forward.--From statement by R. Clipston Sturgis '81.