ones than the calico curtains of their beds; with no other help than the scanty allowances of their Union and the fast shrinking credit with the small dealers.  Hereupon Lord Londonderry, who owns considerable mines in Durham, threatened the small tradesmen in “his” town of Seaham with his most high displeasure if they should continue to give credit to “his” rebellious workers.  This “noble” lord made himself the first clown of the turnout in consequence of the ridiculous, pompous, ungrammatical ukases addressed to the workers, which he published from time to time, with no other result than the merriment of the nation.  When none of their efforts produced any effect, the mine owners imported, at great expense, hands from Ireland and such remote parts of Wales as have as yet no labour movement.  And when the competition of workers against workers was thus restored, the strength of the strikers collapsed.  The mine owners obliged them to renounce the Union, abandon Roberts, and accept the conditions laid down by the employers.  Thus ended at the close of September the great five months’ battle of the coal miners against the mine owners, a battle fought on the part of the oppressed with an endurance, courage, intelligence, and coolness which demands the highest admiration.  What a degree of true human culture, of enthusiasm and strength of character, such a battle implies on the part of men who, as we have seen in the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report, were described as late as 1840, as being thoroughly brutal and wanting in moral sense!  But how hard, too, must have been the pressure which brought these forty thousand colliers to rise as one man and to fight out the battle like an army not only well-disciplined but enthusiastic, an army possessed of one single determination, with the greatest coolness and composure, to a point beyond which further resistance would have been madness.  And what a battle!  Not against visible, mortal enemies, but against hunger, want, misery, and homelessness, against their own passions provoked to madness by the brutality of wealth.  If they had revolted with violence, they, the unarmed and defenceless, would have been shot down, and a day or two would have decided the victory of the owners.  This law-abiding reserve was no fear of the constable’s staff, it was the result of deliberation, the best proof of the intelligence and self-control of the working-men.

Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital.  But the fight had not been in vain.  First of all, this nineteen weeks’ strike had torn the miners of the North of England forever from the intellectual death in which they had hitherto lain; they have left their sleep, are alert to defend their interests, and have entered the movement of civilisation, and especially the movement of the workers.  The strike, which first brought to light the whole cruelty of the owners, has established the opposition of the