On behalf of----Colliery I do hereby give you notice to determine your existing hiring on the nineteenth day of September eighteen hundred and seventy-four, and that the wages and prices heretofore paid at this colliery will from that date be reduced to the rate of twenty per cent. and that if your service be continued, it must be on these terms. In these circumstances the Executive Committee issued a circular and called a special Council. The lodges were asked to send their delegates prepared to discuss and decide upon three questions: "1. Ought bankmen, horsekeepers, furnacemen, etc., to give in their notices? "2. Ought collieries of men (hewers included) who have not received any notice to give in their notices? "3. The matter of arbitration." We will quote a portion or two of the circular. It is very serious and impressive: "It must be clear to all that we are passing through the most important crisis which has marked the history of the present organisation on the need or otherwise of a further reduction; we here offer no opinion, that being a matter which will take the collective wisdom of the county to determine. We wish, however, to point out what seems to us to be one of two ultimatums to the present unpleasant condition of matters in the county. If a stolid and unreasoning resistance be persevered in, a strike is inevitable. We feel certain that nothing can or will prevent a stop. How long such struggle might continue it is impossible to say. But whether it might be for a longer or a shorter period an immense amount of suffering would be entailed. We want you therefore to very carefully consider the whole matter. View the entire position with an unbiased mind, not from the standpoint of mere abstract justice, but from that of probabilities or even possibilities. We are offered arbitration. If we refuse, the press and public will most assuredly say that our position is untenable. If we persistently refuse to submit the entire matter to arbitration, we must prepare to cope with the following difficulties in conducting a struggle. "(1) The strongest combination of employers the North of England ever saw. "(2) Stacks of coal and coke laid up in every direction of the county. "(3) Coal and coke brought from other districts to supply what we may be short of supplying from our own heaps. "(4) The press and public opinion would be against us."