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garded as a base ingratitude by the employers, who show their displeasure by refusing employment, and consequently destroying the ability of the miner to trade at all! But such ingratitude is rarely shown by the men, since the employers keep them so poor that they have no cash, nor credit, save the "pluck-me" stores. The miners tell me that they are swindled right and left in their accounts by overcharges short-weights, and adulteration. But these are our honorable, upright, Christian, enterprising business men, who run their concerns on "strictly business principle." Such is the morality of commercialism. The men tell me that many of them do not handle a cent in cash during a whole year! When the great "battle for bread" was raging in the Hocking valley last winter and the members of the Miners' Union of Ohio were each assessed to pay a certain sum per month to aid the strikers, the miners of Salineville and elsewhere among them had no money, and they paid their assessment in coal at the rare of one ton per month.
As an illustration of the poverty of those workers where labor furnished the fuel for the needs of the people, it was related to me that a miner, father of a family, when passing from his daily toil on the "coal bank" the store of a merchant to whom he owed an unpaid bill for groceries, etc., the business man accosted him and said: "That account is due a long time, why don't you pay me?" The miner answered: "You know how much I make and you know it is not enough to support my family on the commonest necessities of life. If you can show me any way I will be glad to do so." As the miner spoke he held his little 10-year old boy by the hand, and the merchant, eyeing the child closely, said: "Can't you take your son into the mine with you? He can earn something, and in that way you can pay me." The miner shook his head, and as he walked away, sadly holding his little boy's hand and pondering on what the "business man" had said, the tears coursed down his rugged cheek. He afterward took the child into the mine and paid the merchant's bill! Such is the morality practiced by commercialism and taught from the paid pulpit of the church. Capitalism demands its pound of flesh, even though it can be taken from the heart of innocent childhood.
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