Foreign News: Most Hopeful!

Very quietly, very significantly a group of men representing 5,000,000 employes and another group representing £1,000,000,000 in invested capital met together at London last week for the first time. They met on strictly neutral ground, in a lofty pillared room at Burlington House, a room hitherto sacred to the high-minded proceedings of The Royal Society (scientific). There, seated around four baize-covered tables, they founded with high hopes the Conference of Industrial Cooperation.

Purpose: To examine the whole structure of British industry and smooth down, without recourse to propaganda or politics, the points of friction between Capital and Labor.

Leaders & Spokesmen: 1) For Capital, Sir Alfred Moritz Mond, towering manufacturer of industrial chemicals, father of the present Conference, into which he has mustered the active heads of 159 major British corporations; 2) For Labor, Mr. Ben Turner, jovial, moderate President of the British Trades Union Congress, a body so potent that it wrought the great British General Strike (TIME, May 10 to 24, 1926), estimated to have cost the Empire not less than £500,000,000.

To blaze a clear trail away from such catastrophic industrial follies will be the vital task of the new Conference. After three hours in secret session, last week, the leaders were optimistic. Said Mr. Turner: “Extraordinary successful! . . . The employers’ proposals are exceedingly comprehensive. . . . We have entered these conversations without prejudice, committed only to the finding of a just and lasting solution of industrial problems.” Said Sir Alfred Mond: “Most hopeful! . . . We have appointed a joint acting committee of investigation” (to meet under the alternate chairmanship of Mr. Turner and Sir Alfred).

As is usual when British Labor and Capital try to get together, they were baited, last week, by fiery Communist “Emperor” A. J. Cook, recent active generalissimo of the collapsed General Strike. He, discredited, little heeded, stormed: “An absolute farce! . . . The employers want us to sign a new creed of copartnership, co-operation and good-will forever. It is not economics they want, but theology and a doxology.”