little while with the Order of Thinkers and see if there is not some good way out of this dilemma.  McGinnis said that the Company has no right to charge you for keeping your tools sharp.  In one sense this is true.  You have a perfect right to work with dull tools, if you wish to; you have the right to sharpen your own tools; and you also have the right to hire any one else to do it for you.  You work ‘by the ton,’ you own your pickaxes and shovels from handle to blade, and you have the right to do with them as you please.

“There are three hundred of you who use tools; you each pay ten cents a week to the Company for keeping them sharp,—­that is, in round numbers, $1500 a year.  There are two smiths at work at $50 a month (that is $1200), and a helper at $25 a month ($300 more), making just $1500 paid by the Company in wages.  If you will think this matter out, you will see that there is a dead loss to the Company of the coal used, the wear and tear of the instruments, and the interest, taxes, insurance, and degeneration of the plant.  Is the Company under obligation to lose this money for you?  Not at all!  The Company does this as an accommodation and a gratuity to you, but not as a duty.  Just as much coal would be taken from the Gordon mine if your tools were never sharpened, only it would require more men, and you would earn less money apiece.  You could not get this sharpening done at private shops so cheaply, and you cannot do it yourselves.  You have no more right to ask the Company to do this work for nothing than you have to ask it to buy your tools for you.  It would be just as sensible for you to strike because the Company did not send each of you ten cents’ worth of ice-cream every Sunday morning, as it is for you to go out on this matter of sharpening tools.

“But, suppose the Company were in duty bound to do this thing for you, and suppose it should refuse; would that be a good reason for quitting work?  Not by any means!  You are earning an average of $2 a day,—­nearly $16,000 a month.  You’ve ‘been out’ six weeks.  If you gain your point, it will take you fifteen years to make up what you’ve already lost.  If you have the sense which God gives geese, you will see that you can’t afford this sort of thing.

“But the end is not yet.  You are likely to stay out six weeks longer, and each six weeks adds another fifteen years to your struggle to catch up with your losses.  Is this a load which thinking people would impose upon themselves?  Not much!  You will lose your battle, for your strike is badly timed.  It seems to be the fate of strikes to be badly timed; they usually occur when, on account of hard times or over-supply, the employers would rather stop paying wages than not.  That’s the case now.  Four months of coal is in yards or on cars, and it’s an absolute benefit to the Company to turn seventy or eighty thousand dollars of dead product into live money.  Don’t deceive yourselves with the hope that you are distressing the owner by your foolish strike; you are putting money into his pockets while your families suffer for food.  There is no great principle at stake to make your conduct seem noble and to call forth sympathy for your suffering,—­only foolishness and the blind following of a demagogue whose living depends upon your folly.