The Weirton Steel Company, which has been a mote in the eye of General Johnson and the Labor Board for several months, has come out flatfooted against the wage and union provisions of the NRA. It has not only forbidden its employees to organize for purposes of collective bargaining but it has discharged several of them for joining unions. Memoranda on the case, petitions and affidavits, have been circulating back and forth between the Federal Trade Commission and the Labor Board; the first actual response of the Administration has been the filing of a suit for injunction against these practises.

The importance of the Weirton controversy is obvious, and organized labor was not slow to point it out. If each violation must run the gamut of courts and appeals, the job is not going to be done with the expedition that employed and unemployed labor are demanding; the first labor delegation said flatly that if this was the best that the government could do, it should stop pretending and remove its ban on a protest strike. The delegation did not suggest any other action by the Labor Board, for the very good reason that no other action is feasible. An administrative ban on the Weirton Company's practises, made by such a body as the Labor Board or the Federal Trade Commission, would be reviewable by the courts, and might bring to a head all the opposition against the pretensions of the National Recovery Act. This Act is one which can not be enforced by the courts without a tremendous stretch, made under strong administrative pressure, and the strength of administrative pressure is a fact that can only be politically determined. If it can really be enforced at all, it can be enforced by an executive power under a blanket mandate of the people; and the attempt to enforce it must be made under the supposition that it will court industrial defiance, not only of particular provisions, but of the government itself.

The effort to "incorporate" and to "organize" the state means, in the modern context of opposed class interests, the choice of one of those classes. Mr. Roosevelt can come out baldly for the industrialists, forbid the right of strike, set wages, and run the whole private profit economic structure with the iron hand, not of court orders and injunctions, but of executive dictatorship. Or he can encourage and strengthen labor to the point where it will revolt, not only against the profit system, but against his own middle of the road administration, and another executive dictatorship, in the interests of the laboring classes, will take control. The one thing which he cannot do, and it is the thing which he has been trying to do, is to merge the concepts of an organic state and natural rights. Natural rights would give the Weirton Steel Company and the laborers exactly the same backing; it is for this reason a useless doctrine in the solution of particular controversies. The organic state would treat the Weirton struggle as an industrial fact, and solve it in either of the two ways which its organic character might indicate; Mr. Weir and the labor delegation have each presented the extreme solutions, and it is between these extreme solutions, and not on any middle ground, that an effective government must choose. POLLUX.