Later we found that the Russell Sage Foundation had been looking into the matter abroad, through two able men, Dr. Frankel and Mr. Dawson. They were abroad that summer to study the matter and we afterward got in touch with them. The result was that our committee, or rather myself and one other gentleman, because we were not able to get any of the others to meet with us, reported to the bar association that we thought we ought to have three kinds of laws passed; one to appoint a Commission to educate itself, another which would require those persons who had accidents, both employers and employes, to report data, and the third, one that would require the insurance companies insuring such risks in Minnesota to make reports in detail to the Commission, in order that they might study out precisely all the results.
We found that New York and Wisconsin had valuable articles, and so had Massachusetts and one or two other States, in their Labor Bureau reports. Our correspondence with every labor department in the United States did not develop very much more, except some valuable work by the Illinois Commission, and some valuable work by some professors in various institutions in the form of articles and a pamphlet, I believe by the Chicago _Record-Herald_, that was put out while the Illinois Commission had this work under consideration.
The bar association approved that report and asked us to send it on to the Legislature with recommendations for those three bills. Just prior to that we had arranged for meetings with the labor unions in our State for political reasons, to find out what their views were. Then with the president of the employers' association, again for political reasons, to find out what their views were. Finally we got the two together, and they had not been working together so well up there as they might have been in some other places. But by the time of the second meeting they passed a resolution which was to the effect that they would join hands in trying to get a compensation movement started in Minnesota, but that neither should undertake to take any advantage of the other in the Legislature, while they were both faithfully performing their part of that agreement, and they stuck loyally by it.