It was the game of the companies to keep them slaves. They thought it paid better than to have free men. And to this end these companies perfected a remarkable organization to prevent the unionization of the miners. This organization was known as “mine guards,” and the miners were compelled to pay the bills. These guards were furnished by the Baldwin-Felts agency and were composed largely of the scourings of the slums of cities. These gun-men had no legal status but the miners were forced to recognize their authority--and their authority was a gun. The pretext for the use of these armed thugs was the protection of the mines, the purpose was to prevent the organizers of the United Mine Workers from entering the field, to prohibit newspaper men from visiting the camps and exposing the infamy, to forbid the miners from exercising their constitutional right to meet in peaceful assembly for the discussion of their wrongs. The purpose was to Siberianize West Virginia. And the purpose was met. They were there to terrorize over the miners, to panhandle newspaper men and beat up the organizers of the United Mine Workers--and they did their work with a zest. These guards met the trains regularly and every organizer of the United Mine Workers understood that if he left the train he did so at the peril of his life. This condition existed for years within a few miles of the state capital, within little more than two hundred miles of the capital of the republic and was known to exist. The riff-raff of the scums of the cities, reeking with rotten whisky and armed with guns, held high carnival, panhandling organizers, terrorizing miners, insulting women and children, and they did it with impunity. And the reason was that popular government had broken down and had been displaced by the feudalism of the coal barons and their allies. To control the labor market, to dictate the laws, to interpret the laws, the mine owners entered politics and became the bosses. Such, in a general way, was the condition in the mine sections of West Virginia when the supreme fight came in 1912. II