s that have passed upon the question have pronounced illegal a strike for the cement of the closed shop; the Supreme Court of Massachusetts sustained an ction against a strike which sought to compel an employer to deal collectively he union. About the only comprehensive principle which the courts recognize for guidance is that a combination to cease work is an illegal conspiracy when the done to the employer is direct, primary, and intentional, and when the benefit e strikers is remote, trivial, or indefinite. Obviously, such a principle leaves ly too much liberty to the opinions and estimates of the individual judge. The er should be made clear by specific statutes.

The bearing of the decision in the Coronado case upon industrial legislation, id the kind that we have just been considering, is not easy to describe. In a al way, one effect would seem to be a lessening of the importance of the strike, and quently an increase in the importance of legislation. If this veiw of the situation d be taken by the labor unions, the movement for a comprehensive amendment federal constitution as advocated above would be considerably strengthened and erated.

HUMAN RELATIONS IN THE COAL INDUSTRY

THE BROKEN YEAR AND HOW TO MEND IT

George Otis Smith, Director, United States Geological Survey, Washington

The present lack of public anxiety over the coal situation is not at all novel. The lar feeling toward coal has always been a sort of Irish variety of chills and fever. average citizen doesn't get thoroughly warmed up on the coal question until he s to get chilly. Thus it happens that a midsummer coal shortage is likely to be a varm affair.

Yet disregard of unpleasant facts does not stave off disaster. Paralysis of industry ransportation on a country-wide scale is the natural outcome of a coal shortage if ed to the extreme that cannot be many weeks distant. Serious as the present tion is, however, there are fundamental problems more insistent for solution than the pending differences between employer and employee. These basal problems : the whole coal industry to some degree but especially the bituminous branch. up the economics of the business and a lasting settlement of labor controversy d become a possibility; leave these questions unanswered, and industrial peace ot be expected to survive the usual two-year armistice.

What coal producers and coal consumers alike need is reform of the business rather compromise between parties to the controversy, and in this reform it is absolutely tial that the mine worker should co-operate with the mine operator. Too long the mine owners treated the coal business as private privilege and too long have abor leaders with no less monopolistic attitude obstructed every move for undernd efficiency and economy. The people's coal costs too much because of the misidea that mine owner and mine worker can continue to fight over contracts and Cheaper coal and larger earnings will come when engineering is emphasized and bargaining less.

In terms of engineering, the coal industry has a bad load factor; translated into in relations, poorly functioning mines mean poorly employed miners. A longer

working year would seem at first glance, desirable to mine owner, mine worker, and consumer alike. Why not get it?

The trouble with our soft coal mines is not so much the broken year as the broken month, the broken week, and even the broken day. The running time is broken into small pieces, for mine operation is not simply seasonal, it is intermittent. In that theoretical mine of the statistician, the average mine of the country, we find November a longer month than June by 25 per cent, and June longer than April by 10 per cent, and yet the working time in a normal November is only 19 to 21 days. And irregularity creeps into the working week and the working day, for Friday and Saturday are normally shorter days than Monday. Granted that the workers in other industries suffer the handicap of seasonal unemployment, our problem, and the national problem just now, is the betterment of the working time of coal mines and especially bituminous coal mines.

That average mine is located nowhere in particular, and the average working time by states and fields shows marked and significant differences. The average year in the Southern Appalachian region is a fourth longer than the average year in the Central Competitive District. With 215 days as the average year for the whole country we find a 283 day average year in New Mexico, 247 days in Alabama, and 223 days in West Virginia, as against 202 days in Missouri, 197 days in Illinois, and 192 days in Oklahoma. For the soft coal miner this is plainly not a land of equal opportunity.

Markets, quality of coal, mine costs (including wage scales), and car supply are all factors contributing to these differences in mine employment. Unfortunately, we can gauge results better than determine causes. We know the industry to be wasteful, but where are the leaks? The lack of efficiency and the losses due to irregular operation are not universal, for many individual mines work 300 days in the year. Indeed in 1913 when the bituminous mines averaged 232 working days, one-fourth of the half-million men in the industry were employed in mines that worked 280 days or more and nearly 50,000 of them in mines that worked 300 days or more. Our problem in industrial betterment then, is simply to bring the average mine up to the best; to do that, unfavorable conditions must be replaced by favorable conditions.

First among methods of mending the broken year is the practical remedy of stabilizing the coal market. Many reforms can begin at home, and my first practical suggestion for bettering conditions of employment at the coal mine will be addressed to the coal consumer. A more regular market for the mine's output is the first essential, and here is the consumer's opportunity to co-operate. You and I need to buy coal at times when we need the coal least. Off-season delivery of coal, even to the small consumer, whose name is legion, will help materially to make the mine worker's June more like his November. Also, each of us should buy of one dealer, not "shop" for coal. If you or I speculate in our ten-ton purchases of coal, how can we deplore the speculative tendency of our coal dealer and the chain of business hazards thus initiated? Is it not plain that the retail dealer who can depend on his regular trade can himself be a better customer of the wholesaler or the selling agent of the mine? The large consumer can do even more to smooth out the irregularities of mine operation by making long-term contracts, even five-year contracts, and providing for delivery to suit the mine as well as himself. Such contracts could be made at lowest prices, for with long-term contracts in hand the mine operator could reduce his costs to a minimum. With such a steady market, full-year operation and steady employment would become possible, the mine

= r would earn a year's wage, and the public would not pay for idleness. That 1, however, must begin at home, not at the distant mine. The consumer must

it.

With market demands more regular it will become even more obvious that the eveloped industry must suffer deflation; fewer mines and fewer miners can and d furnish the needed coal. Mr. Peabody as a representative operator admits >ne-third of the operating mines represent a burden on the industry, and he sugtheir elimination through bankruptcy. Ellis Searles, the editor of the United Workers' Journal, admits that 150,000 miners, like one-third of the mines, should minated, and he suggests that they leave the mine for the farm. Mr. Peabody ates that the idle days of our bituminous mines involve an annual loss to the capital abor employed of not less than $400,000,000, and I suspect that most of this loss d by the consumer.

A longer working year for a reduced force is the only possible method of bringing t the lower wage scale and the larger annual earnings, both of which are generally ed. It is largely by reason of the high unit rate of wages that coal costs too much, ›n broad economic grounds it may well be questioned whether the producer should id a wage out of all proportion with the wage of the consumer. Can a $5 a day man afford to buy coal mined by a $10 a day mine worker?

To hasten this needed deflation, even though it be accomplished through the workf the law of supply and demand, there must be a better informed and more aroused c opinion. The people need to realize more thoroughly that their industrial life ell as their domestic comfort depends upon coal. This business of mining and disting coal ranks with the public utilities, and public regulation will surely come as arises. The words of President Harding, "Deliberate public opinion never fails," ess a truth as applicable now as in the days of Lincoln.

Whenever public interest is aroused in the coal question, the defensive note of the men is likely to be that appeal for "less government in business," an appeal with h I sympathize so far as governmental regulation might drag politics into business. political danger that really confronts the coal business is that the leaders in the stry will too long be blind to the trend of the times. In this year of the independof the United States of America, the 146th, the American people are not reactionthe old ways of doing business are not to be the new ways. Our reverence for the ileges and rights of private business is giving way to a new attitude. We are asking t is private business and what is public business. Forced to extremes by private disrd of public interest, this tendency in popular thought may even become dangerous, Secretary Hoover's recent statement to the operators that "if our coal industry does govern itself it will surely be governed by the public" was a warning of that danger. suggest that if "less government in business" is desired, the best means to that end ore business in business. Our best mines are so planned and equipped and operated o demonstrate how efficient coal mining can be, and a similar statement can doubtbe made of certain units in the merchandising of coal; yet the average coal mine and average coal yard are far from being gratifying exhibits of that engineering ability usiness thrift which we like to regard as typically American.

In bringing about the adoption of these higher standards and more businesslike ctices in the coal business, public opinion must be the force that refuses capital to n or operate unneeded mines, that refuses to pay wages or profits figured on an

expectation of one-third idleness and two-thirds work, that encourages off-season purchase and storage of coal by consumers. Above all we need an enlightened public opinion that puts a ban alike upon the selfish disregard of the interests of the producer of coal by the purchaser, and of the interests of the consumer by both the mine operator and the mine worker. The present unhappy condition of the coal industry is not an aftermath of the war; rather the blame for most of the evils that burden the coal business and have burdened it for years must be laid on the common garden variety of blind selfishness. The sharp buying of coal and disregard of contracts whenever the market favors the buyer, the profiteering by the operator or dealer when his turn comes, the collective bargaining with the walk-out as the club, all these bring unnecessary hazards into the business and add useless costs to the product.

The general welfare is tied up with a regular supply of lower-cost coal and larger earnings for those who produce it. And the responsibility for mending the broken year needs to be shared by the many who can help thus to bring about the economic and social benefits arising from coal that the nation's industry can afford to buy, and from mining towns of which the nation need not be ashamed.

INTERMITTENT WORK FROM THE STANDPOINT OF SUPERVISION

Hugh Archbald, Superintendent, Victoria Coal Mining Company,
Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania

There are five churches in that part of the city of Scranton which is known as Hyde Park in which the services are conducted in Welsh. One cannot work around the mines near there without hearing the gossip of those churches.

One morning years ago I was working in the office of a boss when old John Powell drifted in. He was an old Welshman who had been a mine foreman for many a year. There is always time to stop and chat around the mines and Old John pulled out his pipe and sat down. "Have you 'eard the new minister in 'Yde Park?" he asked me. I knew that a new minister had arrived two weeks before but had to admit that I had not gone to hear him. "Man, he is fine, Man, he is grand, Man, he is sublime. He do talk for an hour and a half without any subject at all.”

My story this morning can be the opposite of that Welsh minister. I can tell it briefly, and it is a story. I have to live the life of intermittent work and I know its effect upon me and upon the men who work for me. Intermittent work is a thing which I would like to escape from and many men, too, would like to work steadily. In talking about the present strike, a Slav, one of the "foreigners" of the mines, said to me recently, "It is best when everybody work all the time; men, company."

In the beginning will you permit me to make one complaint against the public and the general discussions of coal mining. It is that people seem to forget that there are problems which lie underground within the work of mining. Few people have gone out to the mines and gone underground to the work. And to me, sitting out at the mines, the discussions omit the underground part of the whole problem of coal, and take in only the phases nearest those who do the discussing, the phases which are situated in New York or Philadelphia.

I want to be sure at the outset that you understand that intermittency is a problem of bituminous coal mining, not of anthracite. To the man who works in the bituminous

coal mines intermittency as a broad subject for discussion, is a strange thing. And yet one of the first questions which is asked when two friends meet one another, is "How many days of work are you getting?"

I know that I am at present east of a north and south line through the center of Pennsylvania. East of that line when you mention coal, the person with whom you are talking nine times out of ten promptly thinks of anthracite coal. West of that line everything is bituminous. If the members of this conference are proportioned in the manner of most gatherings, then the majority of you are from the neighborhood of Providence and consequently to most of you coal means anthracite. As anthracite is a domestic coal the probabilities are that it is the only coal which most of you have used and personally know.

Bituminous coal, on the other hand, is an industrial coal. It is the coal used to haul anthracite to market—even the steam sizes of anthracite. It is used for domestic purposes west of that north and south line through central Pennsylvania and in the totals about equal amounts of both coals go for domestic use. But 88 per cent of bituminous coal goes into the development of power and five times as much bituminous coal is mined as anthracite.

Intermittency is not alone an operating problem. It is a home problem as well. I overheard one woman talking across the aisle in a street car to her friend. She was speaking of her husband. "Jim is mighty nice. He never hangs around the house. He is gone by nine o'clock every morning. . . . . Often he goes up home and helps my brother John take care of father. He ain't been at all well for most a year now."

You must realize that in the isolated places where bituminous coal mines are located, the boss of the mines is the father of the community. All troubles come up to him. My friends who know coal mining have been smiling with me over a little incident which happened recently and which shows how the mine boss is turned to in any case of trouble. A few weeks ago I learned that the Union was distributing relief money to those on strike. The amount which came to our local was only enough to give about fifty cents to each member. I came back to my office one noon to find the secretary of the local who has been the main worker in our local and the leader of our men in the present strike which has included us with all the rest, waiting for me. He wanted me to help him get the State Constabulary-the hated state police-so as to protect' from bodily violence while he distributed the relief money, for threats had been against him and he was afraid. He would have liked it if I had come down to th belonging to the United Mine Workers and given out the money myself. I do outside of coal mining you would find the leader of those striking against you com up to you for help. But in coal mining maintaining order is just one of the boss's jobs. He rules over simple men and women.

I mention these things outside of work first that you may see that more than the supervision of intermittent work. Most of the bitum are isolated and the companies have to provide the houses in which conduct the stores where they can get the necessities of life. And part o ing of intermittency is the task of seeing that the men do not buy more pay for out of the money which is coming to them for work done. No work, then the mine boss has the realization that the men cannot buy flour or tea or co any of the other things of life.