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burial benefits, and other general self-help and cooperative help among the members. They were not all members of one union. They were working people who had come together for self-improvement. They carried on classes in English for foreigners at one time. They helped people to get into evening schools. It was strictly for their members and they had lecture courses for them, and things like that. It was very much for their own members, very exclusive.

I remember hearing some talk about the garment workers and being told, “He belongs to the Arbeiter Ring. It's Arbeiter Ring talk.” I gathered from that that it had some sort of German philosophical background which might be said to be socialist in its outlook, but I didn't think it was any more than that. It was a mutual aid society so far as its functions were concerned at that time.

Anyhow, the Department of Labor in all the states was a department concerned with labor legislation. The first legislation in the United States that ever touched, even remotely, the relations between employers and workers, which is trade unionism and collective bargaining, was the Wagner Labor Relations Act. That was the first one anywhere. There was, of course, Section 7 of the NRA, which said that the workers in these industries which were to come under codes should be permitted to organize and to meet their