accept the suggestion.  They insisted upon my naming a Commission of only five men, and specified the qualifications these men should have, carefully choosing these qualifications so as to exclude those whom it had leaked out I was thinking of appointing, including ex-President Cleveland.  They made the condition that I was to appoint one officer of the engineer corps of the army or navy, one man with experience of mining, one “man of prominence,” “eminent as a sociologist,” one Federal judge of the Eastern district of Pennsylvania, and one mining engineer.

They positively refused to have me appoint any representative of labor, or to put on an extra man.  I was desirous of putting on the extra man, because Mitchell and the other leaders of the miners had urged me to appoint some high Catholic ecclesiastic.  Most of the miners were Catholics, and Mitchell and the leaders were very anxious to secure peaceful acquiescence by the miners in any decision rendered, and they felt that their hands would be strengthened if such an appointment were made.  They also, quite properly, insisted that there should be one representative of labor on the commission, as all of the others represented the propertied classes.  The operators, however, absolutely refused to acquiesce in the appointment of any representative of labor, and also announced that they would refuse to accept a sixth man on the Commission; although they spoke much less decidedly on this point.  The labor men left everything in my hands.

The final conferences with the representatives of the operators took place in my rooms on the evening of October 15.  Hour after hour went by while I endeavored to make the operators through their representatives see that the country would not tolerate their insisting upon such conditions; but in vain.  The two representatives of the operators were Robert Bacon and George W. Perkins.  They were entirely reasonable.  But the operators themselves were entirely unreasonable.  They had worked themselves into a frame of mind where they were prepared to sacrifice everything and see civil war in the country rather than back down and acquiesce in the appointment of a representative of labor.  It looked as if a deadlock were inevitable.

Then, suddenly, after about two hours’ argument, it dawned on me that they were not objecting to the thing, but to the name.  I found that they did not mind my appointing any man, whether he was a labor man or not, so long as he was not appointed as a labor man, or as a representative of labor; they did not object to my exercising any latitude I chose in the appointments so long as they were made under the headings they had given.  I shall never forget the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept it with rapture; it gave me an illuminating