As we approach the problem of government in our basic industries as in the nation, we discover two seemingly conflicting tendencies, two great elements in our population apparently pulling in opposite directions. In the question of national security and defence, the one instinctively follows the ancient tradition of European nations, piling up armies and navies, and striving to make America the most formidable military power in the world; the second leans to a policy of reconciliation, striving by conference and understandings with other nations to prevent disagreements and to avert wars. The first makes it a matter of national honor to emphasize individual American rights on land and sea, the property rights of Americans, our financial and economic interests in backward countries, and the military force necessary to enforce those interests; the second aims to establish international relations in which such rights and interests shall be secure to all nations without the constant threat of force. To the one, the world is an arena in which to fight or starve is the eternal choice; to the second, the world is a communion table at which all men are brothers. These same tendencies, these same manifestations of the acquisitive instinct and the consciousness of kind, appear in the record of our basic coal industry. As the industrial revolution got into full swing in America, during and immediately following the Civil War, there was a rush for the possession of the coal mines comparable to the rush for land. Among the men who won possession, there were some who were keenly aware of the public obligations of ownership, who in friendly cooperation with their employes strove to develop their properties in the interest of the public as well as of their employes and themselves. But owners and miners alike took their spiritual color from their social environment and in the soul of the people the acquisitive instinct remained in the ascendant. Men did not go into business or swing their tools for their health. Their first duty, as they saw it, was to make all the money they could as fast as they could, and to put themselves and those dependent upon them on easy street. "God helps them," they said, "who help themselves." They gutted the richest veins for quick profit, as our forests and new lands had been gutted. More mines were opened than the nation could possibly use. There was a gluttonous overdevelopment of the industry which swung up and down in high peaks and low plunges of prosperity and depression, high prices and "no market," feverish employment and long stretches of intermittent work, which for hundreds of thousands of miners meant no work at all, and for many operators meant bankruptcy. The level of government in the industry was in all essential respects the level of hunting tribes.