Paragraphs like the above never reach the printed page of a newspaper that has sworn allegiance to or is bound to support the Magnates.

It is now December twentieth.  The miners resolve to make a final appeal to the Paradise Coal Company to at least start the mines on half time.  If the company grants this appeal, there will be joy in the miners’ homes for Christmas.

Christmas is no more to the Magnates than any other calender day.  The necessary time for the creation of the coal famine has not elapsed, and until it has there will not be another ton of coal taken from the pits.

Harvey Trueman is expected to confer with the leaders in the afternoon.  He will deliver the appeal to the company, and the following day, Sunday, the miners will know if they are to go back to work.

“In the event of Purdy, the final arbiter, refusing to start up on half time,” says Metz, who is now the leader of the Miner’s Union, “we can go to Latimer and Harleigh, to-morrow.  The mines will be closed; they are only working them six days a week now.  We will appeal to the men to quit work unless the Paradise Company gives us a chance to earn our bread.”

“If the Harleigh men won’t go out, they will at least give us some food for a Christmas dinner,” says a miner whose hollow cheeks tell of long fasting.

“Peter Gick died last night,” a miner states as he enters the hall.  “He went to the ash dumps to pick a basket of cinders; on his way back to his house he fell.  He was so weak that he could not get up.  The snow is two feet deep on the road, and it was drifting then; it soon covered him up.  This morning his son, Ernst, found him.  Of course he was frozen stiff.”

“Where is his body?” Metz asks.

“Sheriff ordered it buried by the police.”

“A public funeral might prove dangerous to the Magnates,” observes Metz.  “Our modern rulers have profited by the experience of the ancients.”

Promptly at two o’clock Trueman arrives at the hall.

The committee on resolutions present him with their petition.

“I shall do all that I can to make the Company appreciate the condition in which you are placed.  You may depend upon it, there will be work for you before Christmas,” Trueman assures them at parting.

“We shall want an answer by to-morrow morning at ten o’clock,” the miners urge in chorus.

Harvey Trueman leaves for Wilkes-Barre on the mission of appealing to the humanity of the Coal Magnates.

Miners’ wives and children stream to the Town Hall, to receive their bread and rations.

It is at such times as these, where the miners are ruthlessly shut out of the mines, that the highest value of the Miner’s Union is demonstrated.  From the slender treasury, which is enriched only by the pennies of the miners during their weeks of employment, the money is drawn to purchase the rations that must be had to keep the miners and their families from actually starving when they can no longer buy from the company store.