In a very little while I came to be on friendly terms with the men of this and some other papers, men who, because of their intimate contact with local political and social conditions, were well fitted to enlighten me as to the exact economic and political conditions here. Two in particular, the political and labor men of this paper were most helpful. The former, a large, genial, commercial-drummer type, who might also have made an excellent theatrical manager or promoter, provided me with a clear insight into the general cleavage of local and State politics and personalities. I liked him very much. The other, the labor man, was a slow, silent, dark, square-shouldered and almost square-headed youth, who drifted in and out of the office irregularly. He it was who attended, when permitted by the working people themselves, all labor meetings in the city or elsewhere, as far east at times as the hard coal regions about Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. As he himself told me, he was the paper’s sole authority for such comments or assertions as it dared to make in connection with the mining of coal and the manufacture of steel. He was an intense sympathizer with labor, but not so much with organized as with unorganized workers. He believed that labor here had two years before lost a most important battle, one which would show in its contests with money in the future: which was true. He pretended to know that there was a vast movement on foot among the moneyed elements in America to cripple if not utterly destroy organized labor, and to that end he assured me once that all the great steel and coal and oil magnates were in a conspiracy to flood the country with cheap foreign labor, which they had lured or were luring here by all sorts of dishonest devices; once here, these immigrants were to be used to break the demand of better-paid and more intelligent labor. He pretended to know that in the coal and steel regions thousands had already been introduced and more were on their way, and that all such devices as showy churches and schools for defectives, etc., were used to keep ignorant and tame those already here. “But you can’t say anything about it in Pittsburgh,” he said to me. “If I should talk I’d have to get out of here. The papers here won’t use a thing unfavorable to the magnates in any of these fields. I write all sorts of things, but they never get in.”