“I have your letter of the 25th instant, with enclosure.  These men, not all of whom were miners, by the way, came here and were at lunch with me, in company with Mr. Carroll D. Wright, Mr. Wayne MacVeagh, and Secretary Cortelyou.  They are as decent a set of men as can be.  They all agreed entirely with me in my denunciation of what had been done in the Court d’Alene country; and it appeared that some of them were on the platform with me when I denounced this type of outrage three years ago in Butte.  There is not one man who was here, who, I believe, was in any way, shape or form responsible for such outrages.  I find that the ultra-Socialistic members of the unions in Butte denounced these men for coming here, in a manner as violent—­and I may say as irrational—­as the denunciation [by the capitalistic writer] in the article you sent me.  Doubtless the gentleman of whom you speak as your general manager is an admirable man.  I, of course, was not alluding to him; but I most emphatically was alluding to men who write such articles as that you sent me.  These articles are to be paralleled by the similar articles in the Populist and Socialist papers when two years ago I had at dinner at one time Pierpont Morgan, and at another time J. J. Hill, and at another, Harriman, and at another time Schiff.  Furthermore, they could be paralleled by the articles in the same type of paper which at the time of the Miller incident in the Printing Office were in a condition of nervous anxiety because I met the labor leaders to discuss it.  It would have been a great misfortune if I had not met them; and it would have been an even greater misfortune if after meeting them I had yielded to their protests in the matter.

“You say in your letter that you know that I am ‘on record’ as opposed to violence.  Pardon my saying that this seems to me not the right way to put the matter, if by ‘record’ you mean utterance and not action.  Aside from what happened when I was Governor in connection, for instance with the Croton dam strike riots, all you have to do is to turn back to what took place last June in Arizona—­and you can find out about it from [Mr. X] of New York.  The miners struck, violence followed, and the Arizona Territorial authorities notified me they could not grapple with the situation.  Within twenty minutes of the receipt of the telegram, orders were issued to the nearest available troops, and twenty-four hours afterwards General Baldwin and his regulars were on the ground, and twenty-four hours later every vestige of disorder had disappeared.  The Miners’ Federation in their meeting, I think at Denver, a short while afterwards, passed resolutions denouncing me.  I do not know whether the Mining and Engineering Journal paid any heed to this incident or know of it.  If the Journal did, I suppose it can hardly have failed to understand that to put an immediate stop to rioting by the use of the United States army is a fact of importance beside