In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of enormously valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellers and other Protestant exploiters.  The men who work these mines, some twelve or fifteen thousand in number, come from all the nations of Europe and Asia, and their fate is that of the average wage-slave.  I do not ask anyone to take my word, but present sworn testimony, taken by the United States Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914.  Here is the way the Italian miners live, as described in a doctor’s report: 

Houses up the canyon, so-called, of which eight are habitable, and forty-six simply awful; they are disreputably disgraceful.  I have had to remove a mother in labor from one part of the shack to another to keep dry.

And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former superintendent of the Sociological Department of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company: 

The C.F. & I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and dug-outs that are unfit for the habitation of human beings and are little removed from the pig-sty make of dwellings.  And the people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty.  Frequently the population is so congested that whole families are crowded into one room; eight persons in one small room was reported during the year.

And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses whom the Rockefellers employ: 

     The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as most
     uncouth, ignorant, immoral, and in many instances, the most
     brutal set of men that I have ever met.  Blasphemous bullies.

Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his weights, and applies for the protection which the law of the state allows him.  What happens then?

     “When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of
     the super he was getting too smart.”  “And he got what?” “He
     got it in the neck, generally.”

And when these wage-slaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on strike, in the words of the Commission’s report: 

Five strikers, one boy, and thirteen women and children in the strikers’ tent colony were shot to death by militiamen and guards employed by the coal companies, or suffocated and burned to death when these militiamen and guards set fire to the tents in which they made their homes.

And now, what is the position of education in such camps?  The Rev. James McDonald, a Methodist preacher, testified that the school building was dilapidated and unfit.  One year there were four teachers, the next three, and the next only two.  The teacher of the primary grade had a hundred and twenty children en-rolled, ninety per cent of whom could not speak a word of English.

     Every little bench was seated with two or three.  It was
     over-crowded entirely, and she could hardly get walking room
     around there.