In the
small establishment there had been a friendly human relationship between
employer and employee.
There was no such relation between the great railway magnates, who
controlled the anthracite industry, and the one hundred and fifty
thousand men who worked in their mines, or the half million women and
children who were dependent upon these miners for their daily bread.
Very few of these mine workers had ever seen, for instance, the
president of the Reading Railroad. Had they seen him many of them could
not have spoken to him, for tens of thousands of the mine workers were
recent immigrants who did not understand the language which he spoke and
who spoke a language which he could not understand.
Again, a few generations ago an American workman could have saved money,
gone West and taken up a homestead. Now the free lands were gone. In
earlier days a man who began with pick and shovel might have come to own
a mine. That outlet too was now closed, as regards the immense majority,
and few, if any, of the one hundred and fifty thousand mine workers
could ever aspire to enter the small circle of men who held in their
grasp the great anthracite industry. The majority of the men who earned
wages in the coal industry, if they wished to progress at all, were
compelled to progress not by ceasing to be wage-earners, but by
improving the conditions under which all the wage-earners in all the
industries of the country lived and worked, as well of course, as
improving their own individual efficiency.
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