by being able to avoid this drastic action.  At the time I should have been almost unanimously supported.  With the famine upon them the people would not have tolerated any conduct that would have thwarted what I was doing.  Probably no man in Congress, and no man in the Pennsylvania State Legislature, would have raised his voice against me.  Although there would have been plenty of muttering, nothing would have been done to interfere with the solution of the problem which I had devised, until the solution was accomplished and the problem ceased to be a problem.  Once this was done, and when people were no longer afraid of a coal famine, and began to forget that they ever had been afraid of it, and to be indifferent as regards the consequences to those who put an end to it, then my enemies would have plucked up heart and begun a campaign against me.  I doubt if they could have accomplished much anyway, for the only effective remedy against me would have been impeachment, and that they would not have ventured to try.[*]

[*] One of my appointees on the Anthracite Strike Commission was Judge George Gray, of Delaware, a Democrat whose standing in the country was second only to that of Grover Cleveland.  A year later he commented on my action as follows: 

“I have no hesitation in saying that the President of the United States was confronted in October, 1902, by the existence of a crisis more grave and threatening than any that had occurred since the Civil War.  I mean that the cessation of mining in the anthracite country, brought about by the dispute between the miners and those who controlled the greatest natural monopoly in this country and perhaps in the world, had brought upon more than one-half of the American people a condition of deprivation of one of the necessaries of life, and the probable continuance of the dispute threatened not only the comfort and health, but the safety and good order, of the nation.  He was without legal or constitutional power to interfere, but his position as President of the United States gave him an influence, a leadership, as first citizen of the republic, that enabled him to appeal to the patriotism and good sense of the parties to the controversy and to place upon them the moral coercion of public opinion to agree to an arbitrament of the strike then existing and threatening consequences so direful to the whole country.  He acted promptly and courageously, and in so doing averted the dangers to which I have alluded.

“So far from interfering or infringing upon property rights, the Presidents’ action tended to conserve them.  The peculiar situation, as regards the anthracite coal interest, was that they controlled a natural monopoly of a product necessary to the comfort and to the very life of a large portion of the people.  A prolonged deprivation of the enjoyment of this necessary of life would have tended to precipitate an attack upon these property rights of which you speak; for, after all, it is vain to deny that this property, so peculiar in its conditions, and which is properly spoken of as a natural monopoly, is affected with a public interest.