submission to all exactions; hold them purposely ignorant when the
mines are to be worked and when closed, so that they cannot seek
employment elsewhere; bind them as tenants by compulsion in the
companies' houses, so that the rent shall run against them whether
wages run or not, and under leases by which they can be turned out
with their wives and children on the mountain-side in mid-winter if
they strike; compel them to fill cars of larger capacity than agreed
upon; make them buy their powder and other working outfit of the
companies at an enormous advance on the cost; compel them to buy coal
of the company at the company's price, and in many cases to buy a
fixed quantity more than they need; compel them to employ the doctor
named by the company and to pay him whether sick or well; 'pluck' them
at the company's store, so that when pay-day comes round the company
owes the men nothing, there being authentic cases where 'sober,
hard-working miners toiled for years, or even a lifetime, without
having been able to draw a single dollar, or but few dollars in actual
cash,' in 'debt until the day they died;' refuse to fix the wages in
advance, but pay them upon some hocus-pocus sliding-scale, varying
with the selling price in New York, which the railway slides to suit
itself; and most extraordinary of all, refuse to let the miners know
the prices on which their living slides, a 'fraud,'" says the report
of Congress, "on its face" (pp. 71 and 72). The companies dock the
miners' output arbitrarily for slate and other impurities, and so can
take from their men 5 to 50 tons more in every 100 than they pay for
(p. 76). In order to keep the miners disciplined and the coal market
under supplied, the railroads restrict work, so that the miners often
have to live for a month on what they can earn in six or eight days,
and these restrictions are enforced upon their miners by holding cars
from them to fill, as upon competitors by withholding cars to go to
market. (Document No. 4, p. 77.)

Labour organisations are forbidden, and the men intentionally provoked
to strike to affect the coal market. The labouring population of the
local regions, finally, is kept "down" by special policemen, enrolled
under special laws, and often in violation of law, by the railroads
and coal and iron companies, practically when and in what number they
choose, and practically without responsibility to any one but their
employers, armed as the Corporation see