In spite of his disavowal of legal authority or official responsibility, President Roosevelt's action was publicly regarded as the official action of the nation's chief executive. It gave the public its first intimation of the status of coal as that of a public utility. It stamped upon the coal industry the character of an essential public service which has attached to it ever since. Backed by public opinion, which would have sustained him if he had declared the existence of a public emergency and had taken over the anthracite industry as the government did the entire coal industry during the war, he was able to force the submission of the dispute to a commission of arbitration by whose decision both sides pledged themselves to abide. The strike was settled. A machinery of government was established and put into operation. As the result of President Roosevelt's action, collective bargaining was for the first time given public sanction not only in the anthracite field but throughout the coal industry. For seventeen years, and indeed, with the exception of a brief interval in 1919, for twenty years, peace and constitutional government prevailed not only in the anthracite field, but, with the exception of a few districts, notably certain counties in West Virginia and the coking fields subsidiary to the steel industry in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Alabama, throughout the bituminous fields also. The structure of this government and its basic laws are written into collective contracts, which, together with the policies formulated by the two parties through their national organizations, must be our guides in the quest for an answer to the question as to how, short of the autocratic control of the Fuel Administration, the coal industry is to be developed into an integrated, dependably governed, public service. CHAPTER VII THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY The historians of the growth of democratic government in the coal industry generally date the establishment of collective bargaining as a permanent institution from 1898, when the operators of the Central Competitive Field--Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois--in a joint conference with the representatives of the United Mine Workers of America entered into an agreement which with minor modifications was periodically renewed from that time onward. From that year to 1922 operators and miners alike recognized the agreement in the Central Competitive Field as basic to the agreements in all other fields and the central competitive conference as the necessary prelude to all other conferences. But it was President Roosevelt and the Anthracite Strike Commission which he appointed that lifted human relationships within the industry out of the limbo of frontier strife and periodic guerrilla warfare and stamped them with the quasi-public character of a self-governing constitutional democracy.