boy who mows the lawn wants more than the landlady is willing to pay.
Thus it was in 1902 when thousands of coal miners in Pennsylvania
became dissatisfied with their wages and started a great movement to
force their employers to pay them more.

On one side were the rich men who owned the mines. They, eager to make
as much money for themselves as possible, were not willing to pay the
miners fair wages. Furthermore, they would not spend money to make the
mines safe for the men who worked in them. Accordingly, the living
conditions among the miners were wretched indeed. Poorly paid, they
were forced to dwell in houses that were little more than huts, and
were required to live on the coarsest fare. So dangerous were the
mines that accidents were of almost daily occurrence; yet nothing
could be done as the miners were without a leader. True, labor
agitators came and with silver speech aroused the miners, but they did
not tell them what to do.

For a long time the battle cloud grew darker until finally the whole
nation became alarmed. So grave was the situation that Theodore
Roosevelt, then president, was asked to help avert the crisis that
seemed inevitable. At once the president left Washington for the
scene of conflict. Day after day he sought among the sullen,
half-crazed men for some solution of the difficulty, until finally he
discovered a man big enough to bring order out of confusion.

Mr. Hugh C. Weir, in speaking of this discovery, says: "From the
inferno of the coal-strike dates the cementing of those ties of
friendship and comradeship which have bound John Mitchell and Theodore
Roosevelt. The president, plunging into the heart of the strike,
sought and found the man whose hand held the pulse of events. He found
him, haggard and white with the strain of a great exhaustion, upheld
by the inspiration of a great purpose, and forthwith John Mitchell,
coal-miner, son of a coal-miner, came into a place in the Roosevelt
esteem which few men have equaled and no man surpassed. When at the
White House conference of American governors, the president invited as
guests of honor those five Americans who, in his judgment, ranked
foremost in current progress, John Mitchell, the labor man, was high
in the quintette." To have a plain coal-miner thus honored by the
President of the United States is so exceptional that we cannot help
wondering what there was about Mr. Mitchell that earned for him such
distinction. To discover th