The Coal War by Upton Sinclair Page A

these men. There was one, especially, who made him a friend—a twenty-two-year-old miner from South Wales, whom Hal picked out for the future president of the industrial republic of Great Britain! Such a mind as this youth had, and such a will! Frank Bollett was his name, and he had been trained at the expense of the union at a labor college in London. Two years ago he had written a pamphlet, “The Miners’ Next Step”, which had been published anonymously and circulated among the workers of his part of the country. Now he had come to London to see to the carrying out of his program—“the Mines for the Miners”!
    Young Bollett seemed to have one hatred in all the world, and that for a politician. He did not hate the “masters”, any more than he feared them; the banded workers would settle with the masters very quickly—if only the politicians would keep their hands away! Whether they were capitalist politicians, or called themselves representatives of labor—only let them keep their hands away, and the workers would decide their own destiny!
    Hal went to a gathering one Sunday afternoon, in the home of a well-to-do sympathizer with the miners, and heard young Bollett pitted in impromtu debate against a member of parliament, the editor of a leading liberal weekly. How fascinating to see this great man backed up against the wall and speared through by the logic of a mine-boy!
    To the boy, who had faced the realities of industry, the only person who counted was the producer; he saw the problem from the producer’s point of view, he planned a society in the producer’s interest. But the editor was concerned about the consumer, he cried out for the consumer’s right. It was quite impossible to get him to see that in a just society there would be no consumer who was not also a producer; so that if you made certain that every producer got his full product, you could dismiss the consumer from mind altogether—and with him that elaborate machinery of bureaucracy whereby the liberal statesman dreamed to chain and bind the tiger of exploitation!
    The editor could not see it. But Hal noticed that he went off and wrote as his leading editorial of the next week a temperate and even-handed exposition of the ideas which the young miner had explained to him. So Hal learned something about that British devotion to fair-play, that genius for statesmanship, which is responsible for what freedom now exists in the world. He tried to imagine a senator at Washington, the editor of an organ of culture in New York, coming down from his high seat of authority and taking lessons from a mine-boy! No, the thing was not thinkable! In America they would have barred the young man’s paper from the mails for “obscenity” or “sedition”; they would have sent a cursing police-official to suppress the young man’s meetings, and likely as not to bash in the young man’s head. And the editor of the organ of culture would have stayed in his sanctum, not mentioning, hardly even knowing of these proceedings, but writing bewildered editorials on the spread of the dynamite plague in the American labor movement!

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    In the middle of these events Hal’s thoughts were turned suddenly towards home. There came a letter from Jim Moylan, telling him that there no longer seemed hope of staving off a conflict in Pedro County. The discontent of the workers was mounting, and the operators remained as stubborn as ever. A formal set of demands had been drawn up and sent to them, but the communication remained without answer. Now a call was out for a convention of delegates from the various camps, and there could be little doubt that this convention would declare a strike.
    And the same mail brought a letter from Jerry Minetti, giving the news from the field. Jerry had been “fired” from another camp, but still he was able to do work for the union, for the men had taken to