their history received large earnings, and although prices had risen at the same time, they were still able to secure more for their wages than they have subsequently been able to obtain. After the war, however, although the operators themselves had made large profits, an attempt was made to depress wages and to break up the miners' union. For eight years, from 1867 to 1875, an active and aggressive war was carried on by the operators against the union, the Workingmen's Benevolent Association, and by the close of the latter year, the organization had ceased to exist.

It was especially during the quarter of a century that elapsed between 1875 and 1900 that the abuses leading to the strikes of 1900 and 1902 were inaugurated or intensified. During this period of practically unorganized labor, the conditions of the miners grew worse and worse. The object of the operators seems to have been to keep the miners in subjection by defeating all efforts to form trade unions, and in this endeavor they practically succeeded. The miners became organized from time to time in various parts of the field, but the old expedient was resorted to of playing off one section against another, so that divided, all of the sections fell. During this period the operators also introduced large numbers of laborers from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Italy with the idea of lowering wages through competition and of defeating attempts at organization by keeping on hand an oversupply of unorganized men. It is interesting to note in this connection that poetic justice has been meted out to those who initiated this plan. The surplus of labor has been a curse not only to the men themselves, but to the operators, and the non-English speaking men introduced to break the unions have in the course of time become the staunchest and most loyal adherents of labor organization.

In their unorganized, or only partially organized state, the miners suffered in many ways. The constant accession of new bodies of men willing to work hard and long for small pay depressed wages to a minimum. The old English, Scotch, Irish, German, and Welsh miners were obliged to accept the wages for which newly arrived Poles, Hungarians, and Italians,

under the stress of a merciless competition, were compelled to work.

Much of even these low wages, moreover, was never paid in cash to the mineworkers. There were in vogue many systems for cheating the men. While some companies were reasonably and some scrupulously conscientious about such matters, others incessantly abused the ignorance and impotence of their employees. The early union, the Workingmen's Benevolent Association, had secured a law compelling the weighing of coal and the adop tion of a standard ton, that every man might know what he mined and be paid accordingly. Upon the dissolution of the union, however, the operators compelled the disorganized miners to surrender their rights under this law. The size of the ton increased, so that 2,800 and even 3,190 pounds came to be considered a ton, while the price remained at the same level. The operators who paid their royalties by the ton of 2,240 pounds and who sold their coal to the railroads or to the consumers by the ton of 2,240 or less, exacted from the miner as high as 3,190 pounds to the ton. Where the coal was paid by the car, the same system was adopted, and the car grew, as the men said, as though it were made of live oak. Thus, the encroachments upon the wages of the miners were insidious. If a man were being paid a dollar for filling a certain car with coal, he was paid no more when three or four inches were added to the size of the car, nor was he paid more when he was obliged to add nine or ten inches of "topping" above the railing of the car. In fact he was more likely to be paid less. The companies adopted a system of docking, which in many cases was arbitrary, unjust, and tyrannous. The miner had no opportunity to test whether or not he had been docked fairly for impurities or underweight, but a round sum was taken from him at the sole discretion of the docking boss. This device led on the part of some companies to a system of unblushing theft and reacted by making many of the miners careless. According to the testimony adduced by the operators themselves before the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, the amount docked even by fair companies diminished 50% as soon as the miners were allowed to employ check docking bosses.

In still other ways were the miners subject to deductions and exactions. As the result of an antiquated agreement, the miners were obliged to buy their powder from the companies and to pay $2.75 for a keg which was not worth over $1.10. Since it is impossible to blast coal without powder, the powder grievance became an increasingly serious one as the veins of coal grew thinner and harder to mine.

Not only was the miner mulcted as a producer, but he was controlled and in many cases directly, clearly, and unscrupulously cheated and defrauded as a consumer. The legislature of the state of Pennsylvania had passed anti-truck store laws, but the operators, who have always cried loudest against illegal action by miners, openly and unhesitatingly violated the act and subsequently evaded it by various devices. In many collieries the mine worker was not paid in the legal coin of the realm, in good, hard, money, but was given an order on the store, where he was obliged to buy inferior goods at exorbitant prices. At first, no doubt, the company stores were instituted for the real advantage of the workingmen, since in those days there were practically no stores in the mining towns, and during the carlier period it seems that many of the company stores, as well as many of the company houses, were run with reasonable regard to the interests of the employees. The stores, however, as well as the other institutions, were at best harmful in their tendency, since they were calculated to increase the dependence of the workingman upon his employer; and in many cases they had, intentionally or unintentionally, the effect of defrauding the mine workers. Often a man together with his children would work for months without receiving a dollar of money, and not infrequently he would find at the end of the month nothing in his envelope but a statement that his indebtedness to the company had increased by so many dollars. Many companies carned as much through their company stores as through mining coal, or, as the mineworkers themselves expressed it, many of the companies earned the money not only by mining coal but by mining miners. The company houses also served in some cases as a means of extortion, in other in

stances, as a weapon to be used against the miners, the cruel and merciless eviction of the Markle tenants showing what could be done in this way against unorganized workingmen..

During this whole period of unorganized labor, during these halcyon days, upon which the operators have never ceased to look back with regret, the conditions of the workingmen were extremely bad and wages were low and fluctuated violently. The miners averaged only one hundred and ninety ten-hour days per year, and the mine workers were, of course, paid only for the time which they were allowed or permitted to work. In very good times the men were able to work a fairly large number of days, but in times of depression conditions grew rapidly worse. Whatever advantages resulted from the reckless and unrestricted competition of the time accrued to the coal companies or the railroads, and whatever disadvantages or hardships ensued fell to the lot of the workmen. The coal operator played with the mine worker a game of chance, in which it was "Heads, I win; tails, you lose."

Even when the mines changed from ownership by the coal companies. to ownership by the railroads, the condition of the miners did not appreciably improve. In the early 70's the anthracite railroads, with the Reading at their head, began to invade the field and to buy up coal properties on all sides, and this process has been continued for thirty years. The mine workers, however, disorganized as they were, did not secure any advantage from the economies which it was claimed were effected by the railroad companies' owning the mines. No increase in wages could be paid as long as the railroads felt themselves obliged to pay dividends on an enormous and excessive capitalization. The former owners had not only extorted money from the mine workers, but had capitalized their future chances of extortion in the price which they asked for their property. In the purchase of these lands, the railroads, in an era of unbounded optimism, launched into the wildest extravagances, and some of these companies have since been chronically in the hands of receivers in an attempt to sweat out of their

system the excess water. The cry for dividends raised by stockholders, loaded down with securities bought at a ruinous price, had the effect of further stimulating the directors to look for more earnings out of the wages of the workingmen. Some of these coal companies, moreover, were and still are "mine poor," possessing properties which will be of enormous value in the future, but which are necessarily idle now, and the burden which should be borne by future generations was shifted to the shoulders of the mine workers.

In one respect the advent of the great railroad corporations has been of advantage to the mine workers. By means of these large organizations, controlling vast sums of money, the industry of mining coal has been systematized and some check placed upon the indiscriminate and cut-throat competition prevailing in former times. The railroad companies have, perhaps, been foremost in introducing reforms on the technical side of mining, in improving ventilation and the general conditions of work. It is only fair to state that the worst abuses of company stores, company houses, company doctors and various other means and forms of extortion, were practiced to a less extent by the railroads than by some of the independent operators, although it is claimed by these latter that they were forced to such courses by the extortionate freight rates on coal to the seaboard. Upon the whole, however, the railroads failed to improve or ameliorate the conditions of the men under their control. Wages were not increased, hours not reduced, grievances not removed, and the unions of the workmen not recognized by or through any voluntary action of the railroad corporations. Whatever small advantage the mine workers secured from the advent of the railroad companies was purely incidental to the improved methods of mining which had come into vogue. In their hostility to trade unions, moreover, and in their refusal to grant any reform or redress until extorted from them, the railroad corporations failed signally in their obligations toward the great body of workingmen, upon whose labor their profits and their general welfare ultimately depends.