The population of the town has been increasing steadily for the past thirty years, until to-day it reaches the proportions of a populous city.  There is little variety in the citizens; but the contrast they present makes up for this deficiency.  Broadly speaking there are but two classes, the magnates and their mercenaries.  The former live in the mansions on the esplanade and constitute the governing minority.  The coal miners and the workers on the breakers, who eke out their lives in slavery, and who sleep in quarters that make the huts of the peasants of Europe seem actually inviting, constitute the vast majority.

The most prosperous business of the town outside of the Coal industry, which is, of course, monopolized by the magnates, is the Undertaking business.  There are almost as many establishments for the burial of man as there are saloons to cater to his cheer.  In contradistinction to the custom in this country, the business has been taken up by others than the worthy order of sextons.  That this condition should be, is accounted for by the fact that there is a paucity of churches in the town, and that the sextons were unable to accomplish the work that devolved upon their craft.  Death is not attributable, in the main, to natural causes in Wilkes-Barre; it is brought about by the engines of destruction which the magnates are pleased to term, Modern Machinery.

Association makes the mind incapable of appreciating nice distinctions in regard to familiar objects or persons.  Thus to the residents of the town there is nothing abnormal in their condition.  It is only to the observer from without that the horrors of the Pennsylvania town are apparent.  That such a spot should develop in a State high in rank, and among the oldest of those comprising the greatest republic, seems incomprehensible.  In the very State where the Declaration of Independence was sent to the world, proclaiming that men are created free and equal, and that the right of the majority is the supreme law, how comes it that a settlement can be maintained where the rights of the majority can be ignored and suppressed at the point of the bayonet?  For an answer to this question, comes the monosyllable—­Trusts!

Wilkes-Barre is a typical specimen community which may be taken as the sample unit for a microscopic investigation of the conditions that have created the modern institution of voluntary slavery.  The scrutiny of the specimen is given through the eyes of a resident of the town, and the observations are his.

“In a month then, they will shut down three of the mines, and will close the Jumbo Breaker.  You know what that means.  I have asked the men of Shaft Fifteen if they intend to starve, and they answered to a man that they would sooner be shot than starve like rats in their homes.”

“What is that to me?  Am I to look after every man who has ever blasted a ton of coal in my pits or crushed in the breakers?