question as to which corporate interest should control legislation--
whether the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose master mind was the Republican
leader of the state, United States Senator Sewall, or the Public Service
interests, whose votaries and friends were Senator Smith of New Jersey,
and Milan Ross, Sr., of Middlesex County.

While these corporate interests fought among themselves over the matter of
a United States senatorship or the governorship of a state, they were at
one in their unrelenting, bitter, and highly organized opposition to the
passage of what in this day we call by the highly dignified name of Social
Welfare Legislation. The voices of those liberal-minded men and women of
the state, who, year after year, fought for this legislation, were like
voices crying in the wilderness. An illustration of corporate opposition
was the unrelenting attitude of the Special Interest group of the state to
the passage of the Employers' Liability Act. Every decent, progressive,
humane man in the state felt that the old, barbaric, Fellow-Servant
doctrine should be changed and that there should be substituted for it a
more humane, wholesome, modern doctrine. Nearly every state in the Union
had already recognized the injustice of the old rule, but the privileged
interests in New Jersey could not be moved in their bitter and implacable
opposition to it, and for over half a century they had succeeded in
preventing its enactment into law. Progressives or New Idea Republicans,
high in the councils of that party, had fought with their Democratic
brethren to pass this legislation, but always without result. At last
there came a revolt in the Republican party, brought about and led by
sturdy Republicans like Everett Colby of Essex, and William P. Martin of
the same county; George Record and Mark M. Fagan of my own county, Hudson.
Out of this split came the establishment in the ranks of the Republican
party itself of a faction which called itself the New Idea branch of the
Republican party. The campaign for humane legislation within the ranks of