As to the relative merits of the policy of national ownership as advocated by the United Mine Workers of America, and the policy of free competition and unrestrained private initiative advocated by the organized operators, it is for the informed public ultimately to judge. For two years, the miners' nationalization resolution stood as the expression of a more or less vague aspiration, a more or less vague faith that public ownership would check overdevelopment and so eliminate the humanly demoralizing effects of intermittent production and irregularity of employment. Nationalization, the miners believed, would go far to correct the disastrous moral and physical effects of a situation which on an average of ninety-three days in each working year, deprives them of the opportunity to work. At their next national convention, held in Indianapolis in 1921, they themselves recognized the controversial nature of their nationalization policy. So they moved to less debatable ground. They created a Nationalization Research Committee to get at and secure the publication of facts. In his first public address as chairman of this Nationalization Research Committee, Mr. John Brophy, president of the organized miners in district No. 2, Central Pennsylvania, instead of dogmatizing about the miners' policy of public ownership and democratic administration as the infallible remedy for the evils of the coal industry, appealed to the public, the operators, and the miners "to stop theoretical squabbling and cooperate with us in making all facts about the industry available to the public. We believe in intelligently planned industry. We believe that the only method for the intelligent organization of the industry is nationalization. The employers disagree. In order to arrive at a decision we ask them to submit the facts to the American people, the only jury that has a right to pass judgment on the case.... We ask immediate legislation for centralized, continuous, and compulsory fact-finding in the coal industry."