_"The article may seem unduly to favor the miners," wrote the Baltimore Sun man in sending it in. "I went to West Virginia absolutely unprejudiced, with the idea of telling the truth about the situation. I found conditions I did not believe could exist in America, and I am no novice in the newspaper game, having seen some pretty raw things in my time. I told the truth about them, and am afraid I have gotten myself disliked."_
_The fairness of the article is disputed by Neil Robinson, secretary of the West Virginia Mining Association. His protest is published in the forepart of the magazine._--Ed.]
For nearly a year a state of turmoil amounting in practical effects to a civil war has existed in the coal fields of West Virginia. The situation centers in the Kanawha Valley, hardly more than twenty miles from Charleston, the capital of the state.
The military power of the state has been used with only temporary effect; martial law has been declared and continues in force; the governor of the state has been defied and denounced from the state house steps and within his hearing; men and women have been thrown into prison and are still there for espousing the cause of the miners, and the grim hillsides of the canons in which the mines are situated are dotted with the graves of men who have been arrayed against one another in this conflict between capital and labor.
Of course, there have been errors and excesses on both sides. The men in the mines are not angels by any means, and neither are the men for whose profit they work. But there has been no profit on either side for the last year and it looks as if there would be none for a long time to come. The men of both sides are pretty good fellows away from the mines and the subject of mining; on the matter of mining, they show the obstinacy of men who look at a proposition from but one point of view, who see no justification of the position of those who oppose them and who seem to have lost absolutely the sense of proportion.
If the efforts made by William B. Wilson, former Congressman from Pennsylvania and former secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers of America, to have a federal investigation of the situation early in the struggle, had been successful, the whole matter might have been settled long since. But his resolution calling for a congressional investigation was buried at the last session of Congress and was never resurrected.