can sell out at a large price, and during the time of such advance the man at the mines may not proceed till the price again falls.

So the laboring men of the mines have been trifled with from year to year. Can we wonder that their patience is exhausted? They have finally come to the only reasonable conclusion available, and that is the basis. This will, in a measure, give them a temporary relief; but they must not stop at basis. Equality of power is the grand desideratum. The highways of Pennsylvania have more power than the people. These vast corporate bodies must come to terms with the people, before the people can prosper. The man who gives away his coat must expect to cringe under the inclemencies of the season. So he who gives away his dinner must expect to go hungry.

The highway is the captain of capital. He is a severe tactician. Will the laboring masses promote him, or remove the cotton swabs from his shoulders? Vested rights! Pray what are vested rights but so many sacrifices made by the people? Let highways be pack-horses, but let the people hold the reins. In this only are prosperity and personal freedom.

Looking, then, at the real cause of trouble, so far as the coal business is concerned, the highways, through legislative sanction, have seized the trade. They have the lever in their own hands. How they get this

power we will not stop to inquire, nor petition for a committee of inquiry, with power to send for persons and papers; they have it. Laboring men of the mines, as well as operators, must bring these highways to the BASIS! Down to that huge grindstone must they come, and in the adjustment of a proper basis the operator is quite as much interested as the miner.

I define the word operator as a person who is carrying on mining, disconnected with the ownership of transportation and railroad privileges. The highway to market has no right to control the market! When we come to reflect that a mere carrying road is clothed with the vast powers that some of them are, it strikes us with astonishment in a double sense: in the first place, that the men who own them should have had the rashness and temerity to ask for these great and exclusive privileges; and, secondly, that a legislative body should ever have entertained the idea, for a moment, of granting them! We are informed that such things are unknown in Europe; that a road there is a road, and nothing else. A road here is everything its managers may choose to make it. We do not deny the propriety of companies or individuals having branch or connecting roads, for the accommodation of their own trade. We speak of the great thoroughfares to the market. Nor shall we ever raise our voice against any road that is especially confined to the

accommodation of the travelling public or the transportation of merchandise, and doing those things alone which properly belong to it. Of such there are many, and they are entitled to a favorable consideration by the public.

But these real estate, commercial, mining, political, and law-making highways do not commend themselves, particularly, to the community generally, and least of all to the laboring men of the nation. They may be said to furnish employment, but this is a poor equivalent compared with the great wrongs inflicted in the usurpation of public and private immunities. Cooperative measures cannot get hold of consolidated and incorporated power. Co-operation, to become a success, must have an open field and ground unoccupied. Highways, when they become fairly entrenched, are very formidable. Their strong boxes

make better barricades than the cobble-stones of Parisian streets. The laboring men of the country must see to it that there are no more confirming acts, no more special grants, no more exclusive privileges. Too many they already have. They are the vampires which gnaw to death the civil and political rights of the working men of this nation. They destroy equality, and are the most fearful enemies of private and individual rights.

CHAPTER X.

ARBITRATION.

THE consequences resulting from the suspension of labor by large bodies of men are exceedingly disastrous. These sudden suspensions are called "strikes." They not only injure the men themselves and their families, but all branches of business in their vicinity, and even other branches of trade elsewhere which are directly or indirectly connected with the material produced by the strikers. Every day's labor contributes to the aggregate wealth of the whole community. When, therefore, fifty thousand men are out of employment for a succession of months, assuming the great majority thus idle to be persons of small means, and dependent entirely on the labor of their hands for their support, it will be seen that there must not only be an immense loss to the general stock in trade, but also an immense amount of individual want and suffering. Nor is this all.

It is computed that there are fifty thousand men engaged in the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania. In the strike of this number it will be fair to estimate

that there are not less than twenty-five thousand working men engaged in different occupations immediately connected with the trade, so that when the miners strike this class is thrown out of employment also.

It therefore frequently occurs that seventy-five thousand men are at the same time out of employment; and suspensions have continued four months at a time in the coal region. Now, estimating an average of two dollars as the daily wages of each man, and we have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars as a total and absolute loss per day. Allowing twenty-six working days to the month, and that the strike continues four months, and the wages lost will amount to fifteen million six hundred thousand dollars.

In this way we are enabled to form some proper idea of a strike in the coal mines. We may ascertain pretty nearly the cost in dollars and cents; but we have no standard by which we can measure the suffering and misery that is necessarily incident.

It then becomes a duty upon the part of all good citizens to volunteer their good offices to prevent, if possible, the occurrence of these public and private calamities.

Strikes arise from disagreement as to the price of wages between the employer and the employed. They seldom, if ever, spring from ill feeling upon either side, or a want of fidelity and punctuality in the fulfilment of contracts; but generally from an