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under the Constitution and that it was not a regulation of commerce between the states.

I'm sure that the President had not heard of the NRA when he offered me my post. I may be wrong about this, but I don't think he had heard of that idea. Nothing that he said to me then or that he said to me later ever gave me the idea that at that time, in February 1933, he had any concepts in his mind at all that finally led to the NRA. I will come to some of the preliminaries of the NRA at a later time, because we were innocent of them on this night. I'm very sure he hadn't thought of them, and certainly I hadn't.

As I look back on it, I think the NRA was a device to get around the constitutional preventives for a program of regulation of hours, wages and other good measures for the working people in the interests of a strong economy.

Workmen's compensation had spread pretty well over the country and the principal industrial states had a form of workmen's compensation. It had been the one piece of labor legislation that had been copied throughout the country. I mentioned that to the President that night in those terms, but said that I conceived it to be a part of the duty of the Secretary of Labor - and this was a critical idea really - to stimulate and promote among the states the adoption of