We now enter upon the most startling feature of the feudalism of West Virginia in the coal districts. It was soon made evident to the thoughtful that the system was in position to enforce darkness. With pitched battles, armored trains, murdered women, there was little or nothing about it in the press of the country. But when the story that a woman of the celebrity of “Mother” Jones, loved by millions among the toilers, was to be tried for her life before a drumhead courtmartial was told in less than a dozen lines, the system made a fatal blunder. That little light illumined the darkness. Senator Kern, reading these few lines in the _Washington Post_, expressed his amazement to those in his office that so little information was furnished. Far out in San Francisco, Fremont Older, the fighting editor of _The Bulletin_, who had been one of the leaders in the movement that destroyed the Schmitz boodle brigade and sent Abe Reuf to the penitentiary, talked it over with his clever wife and decided that she should go at once to West Virginia and ascertain by personal observation the occasion for the silence. The story of Mrs. Older was soon told in _Collier’s Weekly_--a brief, gripping, startling story of an unthinkable situation for America. The darkness gave such light that magazines took steps to secure articles concerning an unparalleled condition. Harold E. West’s startling story of “Civil War in West Virginia” appeared in _The Survey_ in early April. An even more amazing story from M. Michelson, under the satiric title, “Sweet Land of Liberty,” appeared in the May number of _Everybody’s Magazine_. _Collier’s Weekly_ gave its readers Mrs. Older’s story about the middle of April. The country began to wonder--and to wait. Meanwhile the most dangerous and startling evil in the situation--the power of the governor to trample upon the constitutional rights of the people of his state, to ignore the civil courts when they were in session, and try men and women for their lives by a military tribunal--was vigorously contested in the Supreme Court of Appeals in the now famous habeas corpus cases of Mays and Nance and a little later in the cases of Jones, Boswell, Batley and Paulson. The constitution of West Virginia was explicit and emphatic on the point, but the court decided that the constitutional rights of citizens could be brushed aside. A more remarkable decision has probably never been handed down by any American tribunal. How remarkable the world was permitted to understand through the vigorous and indignant dissenting opinion of Judge Ira E. Robinson. And yet for three months this military tribunal sat at Pratt on Paint Creek sending men to the penitentiary and jail and fixing penalties in many cases in excess of those fixed by the statute with the approval of the then Governor Glasscock.