The great Anthracite Strike of 1902 left an indelible impress upon the people of the United States.  It showed clearly to all wise and far-seeing men that the labor problem in this country had entered upon a new phase.  Industry had grown.  Great financial corporations, doing a nation-wide and even a world-wide business, had taken the place of the smaller concerns of an earlier time.  The old familiar, intimate relations between employer and employee were passing.  A few generations before, the boss had known every man in his shop; he called his men Bill, Tom, Dick, John; he inquired after their wives and babies; he swapped jokes and stories and perhaps a bit of tobacco with them.  In the small establishment there had been a friendly human relationship between employer and employee.

There was no such relation between the great railway magnates, who controlled the anthracite industry, and the one hundred and fifty thousand men who worked in their mines, or the half million women and children who were dependent upon these miners for their daily bread.  Very few of these mine workers had ever seen, for instance, the president of the Reading Railroad.  Had they seen him many of them could not have spoken to him, for tens of thousands of the mine workers were recent immigrants who did not understand the language which he spoke and who spoke a language which he could not understand.

Again, a few generations ago an American workman could have saved money, gone West and taken up a homestead.  Now the free lands were gone.  In earlier days a man who began with pick and shovel might have come to own a mine.  That outlet too was now closed, as regards the immense majority, and few, if any, of the one hundred and fifty thousand mine workers could ever aspire to enter the small circle of men who held in their grasp the great anthracite industry.  The majority of the men who earned wages in the coal industry, if they wished to progress at all, were compelled to progress not by ceasing to be wage-earners, but by improving the conditions under which all the wage-earners in all the industries of the country lived and worked, as well of course, as improving their own individual efficiency.

Another change which had come about as a result of the foregoing was a crass inequality in the bargaining relation between the employer and the individual employee standing alone.  The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies, which employed their tens of thousands, could easily dispense with the services of any particular miner.  The miner, on the other hand, however expert, could not dispense with the companies.  He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get one.  What the miner had to sell—­his labor—­was a perishable commodity; the labor of to-day—­if not sold to-day—­was lost forever.  Moreover, his labor was not like most commodities—­a mere thing; it was part of a living, breathing human being.  The workman saw, and all citizens who