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a constitutional method for it, either in the states or at the federal level.

I really thought that we would have to work for many years on the basis of persuading the states to pass suitable legislation, state by state. I did not dream that we could really find a way of having a federal hours law, or a federal law that regulates the physical conditions of work places to prevent accident and disease. I thought the Department of Labor should bring knowledge and education into operation to persuade the states to pass proper legislation. I conceived of that function as being a very vital function that had never even been tried. As the head of the Department of Labor in New York, I knew that we never heard from the U.S. Department of Labor, that we never saw any of them, never heard anything from them. We didn't even get their publications unless we asked for them. In other words, there had never been the slightest effort on the part of the federal government to bring any knowledge to bear upon the problems of labor legislation in the State of New York, or the State of Massachusetts, or the State of New Jersey. I thought it was the function of the Department of Labor to do that, to make the lead in giving them the knowledge and the will to make laws of their own which were good laws.

One of the plans that I told Roosevelt I had when