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kind of executive order - that is, what kind of variation in the hours of labor would produce the largest amount of production in the war industries, and how could we work out an executive order that would give a leeway on hours of labor in certain essential industries, and press down harder than ever on the lampshade industry, or something that was purely ornamental, luxurious and not an essential in wartime.

Of course, there are great economic hazards in riding into that field roughshod when you have a free economy where people use their capital and their labor as they see it. But still, we were prepared. We had the outlines laid. By cooperation between the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Wage-Hour Division we had roughly outlined what were obviously the essential industries and what were obviously the non-essential ones, but it was clear that if the war was long and deep they would be shrunken to almost anything, would have to be, either by control of their capital, or of their materials, or by executive order. As it happened what all parts of the government finally agreed upon was to reduce them by control of their materials, not give them materials enough to work with so that they shrank of their own accord and the labor moved over into the essential areas.

We had also made out a plan of how we would proceed