Excerpt from Labor in Europe and America: Personal Observations From an American How I came to make this trip to Europe is explained in the following passage of my report as President to the annual convention of the American Federation of Labor held in Toronto, November, 8-20, 1909: "For two succeeding conventions the fraternal delegates from the British Trade Union Congress, on behalf of their movement, extended an invitation to me to visit their congress and make an investigation of labor conditions in England. We had some correspondence with the International Secretariat relative to participation in the International Trade Union Conference. Because of the pending elections of 1908, I requested the convention of 1907 not to direct me to accept the invitation. "At the Denver Convention in 1908 one of the committees took cognizance of the matter and presented the following report, which was unanimously adopted by a rising vote of the convention: "'Your committee recommends the indorsement of what the president has to say under this heading, and expresses the hope that the interchange of fraternal visits may be continued and extended. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.