ith the small dealers.
Hereupon Lord Londonderry, who owns considerable mines in Durham,
threatened the small tradesmen in "his" town of Seaham with his most high
displeasure if they should continue to give credit to "his" rebellious
workers. This "noble" lord made himself the first clown of the turnout
in consequence of the ridiculous, pompous, ungrammatical ukases addressed
to the workers, which he published from time to time, with no other
result than the merriment of the nation. When none of their efforts
produced any effect, the mine owners imported, at great expense, hands
from Ireland and such remote parts of Wales as have as yet no labour
movement. And when the competition of workers against workers was thus
restored, the strength of the strikers collapsed. The mine owners
obliged them to renounce the Union, abandon Roberts, and accept the
conditions laid down by the employers. Thus ended at the close of
September the great five months' battle of the coal miners against the
mine owners, a battle fought on the part of the oppressed with an
endurance, courage, intelligence, and coolness which demands the highest
admiration. What a degree of true human culture, of enthusiasm and
strength of character, such a battle implies on the part of men who, as
we have seen in the Children's Employment Commission's Report, were
described as late as 1840, as being thoroughly brutal and wanting in
moral sense! But how hard, too, must have been the pressure which
brought these forty thousand colliers to rise as one man and to fight out
the battle like an army not only well-disciplined but enthusiastic, an
army possessed of one single determination, with the greatest coolness
and composure, to a point beyond which further resistance would have been
madness. And what a battle! Not against visible, mortal enemies, but
against hunger, want, misery, and homelessness, against their own
passions provoked to madness by the brutality of wealth. If they had
revolted with violence, they, the unarmed and defenceless, would have
been shot down, and a day or two would have decided the victory of the
owners. This law-abiding reserve was no fear of the constable's staff,
it was the result of deliberation, the best proof of the intelligence and
self-control of the working-men.

Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled
endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not
been in vain. Fi