From the beginning, certain of the coal owners, notably those in sections of West Virginia and Alabama, whose coking coals make them economically subsidiary to the steel industry, have held strongly to the autocratic powers and privileges which the conception of property carried over from the pre-revolutionary monarchical days when the king was generally recognized, _Dei gratia_, as the custodian of the national hoard. But the Roosevelt Commission took the stand which has increasingly won public acceptance, that autocracy in industry is incompatible with democracy in the political state, and that they must both rise or fall together. Forms may change, but it may be taken as axiomatic that if democracy is the law determining the evolution of political civilization,--if it is the condition of the full development of the individual personality and the attainment of the good life and human brotherhood,--it will survive and grow in industry as well as in the political realm. It is from this principle of democratic evolution, and not from the strikes and lock-outs and barterings over wages, hours, and profits incidental to its development, that collective bargaining and industrial democracy derive their fundamental significance. In appointing the Commission "at the request both of the operators and of the miners," President Roosevelt asked them not only to pass upon the questions in controversy, but also "to establish the relations between the employers and the wage workers in the anthracite fields on a just and permanent basis."