Jasper County Democrat, Volume 3, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 September 1900 — Editor’s Awful Plight. [ARTICLE]

Editor’s Awful Plight.

F- M. Higgins, Editor Seneca (Ills)., News, was afflicted for years with Piles that no doctor or remedy helped until he tried Huckten's Arnica salve, the best it, the world. He writes, two boxes wholly cured him, Infallible for Filet. Cure guaranteed. Only 25c. Sold by J. A. Larsh druggist.

If there is any class of labor in the world that should be well paid it is that of the coal miner who takes his ljfe in his hands 'every time he enters the bowels of the earth to toil for the _ soulless corporations. Nearly every week we read of scores of lives lost in some mine horror, and yet this perilous occupation is the poorest paid of any in the whole country. There are no other employments that have so little possibilities of enjoyment, so little of the common blessings of life as that of the coal miner. He ought to be well paid and his family have a fair chance, but he isn’t. The mining companies generally own the miserable shacks the miners are compelled to live in, for which they charge exorbitant rents, while the company pluck-me stores get the balance of the poor devils’ scanty earnings and generally keep them in its debt. Whole families are compelled to labor in the mines to eke out a scanty existence. No one can realize the pitiful condition of these people who has not personally been among them and seen with his own eyes the true facts. The writer, born and raised a republican and believing in its principles, years ago got his eyes open to the fallacy of the republican party’s plea for a high tariff to “protect the American laborer,” through observations made while in the factory districts of Massachusetts and seeing the true condition of "protected” labor. We saw then that the whole protective theory was a sham and a fraud, so far as its benefits to the American laborer was concerned,, but it did enable the protected manufacturer to keep up the price of his product and reap great benefit therefrom. The factory owner owned tho tenement houses, boarding houses, coal yards, market places and pluck-me stores, etc., and it was difficult for a single man to get work if the company had any unoccupied tenements. The rents charged were enormous and with the aid of the company or pluckme stores the mill owners got back about all of the meager wages paid their employes. This started us to investigating other claims of the republican party, and the result was that we landed in the democrat camp fifteen years ago, and our conscience has never pricked us any for having done so. Having seen with our own eyes the condition of factory employes in Massachusetts at that time we can fully realize what must be that of the poor, ignorant miners in the coal regions, where it is a hundred times worse. The miners have just grievances but -so great a hold has the coal trust got on the throat of the government, and especially the great republican state of Pennsylvania, where the coal trust and railroads control all legislation, they will be forced in the end to submit at the point of a bayonet, and then their condition will be worse thfvu ever.