It was the policy of the state not to encourage the mining of the precious minerals by private enterprise. The miners of the state were fast becoming absorbed in our Co-opolitan Association and wages had risen to nearly four dollars per day for skilled or unskilled workers, because a membership in the Co-opolitan Association or its Industrial Army paid that amount annually. Mine owners sought to obviate what they called the evil of high wages by importing cheaper labor. At first they attempted the introduction of Chinese miners and later an ignorant class of Italians, Hungarians and Slavonians. Our Great Council prohibited aliens from owning, holding or acquiring real estate or making investments of any kind within the state on and after the date of the passage of a law to that effect. It also prohibited the importation of aliens into the state as laborers, or the employment of any such by any person, association or corporation. These laws were all held to be valid and constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, which some years after their passage had occasion to pass upon them. The result was that capital engaged in mining in Idaho withdrew and some of the mines were purchased at a low figure and operated by the Co-opolitan Association. Here again the press of the United States denounced the immorality of the Co-operative Commonwealth, because of its oppressive conduct toward capital. Immoral indeed! Idaho simply made laws which in other states or countries have never been disapproved as immoral. The Co-opolitan Association gave to labor the same high wages in all its departments, and in that manner made laborers anxious to join the Association. This left the mine owner to do his own work or pay as much as the worker could earn as a Co-operator. The capitalist could not compete in the labor market with labor itself, when labor employed its skill and force in its own behalf. If the mine which was made to produce wealth for capital and peril, distress and death for labor, became valueless, because there was no longer a force to work it, whose fault was that? We did not steal the gold which glistened in its dark caverns! We did not rob the capitalist of the labor which he owned! The labor of men and women was not his vested right, like his mine. He had preached the merits of competition and we had simply competed for and won the labor force that dug his mine. Now the mine was worthless because the men who made it would no longer work it. What did the Co-opolitan Association do which was immoral? Having taken its labor force and set it at work for itself, this mine had no value except if the labor force could be restored to it.