“The differences between the miners and operators, which were considered irreconcilable, have been amicably adjusted. Peace now reigns in this section where heretofore existed strife, contention, and armed conflict. The relations between the operators and the miners have become friendly and conciliatory. Business has been resumed and the mines are being operated. Martial law has been abolished and civil law and authority fully established. The committee is satisfied that the investigations have greatly aided in the accomplishment of these beneficial and much-desired results.” And the miners knew, what was of more vital importance to them, that none of their men would serve twenty years in the penitentiary at the behest of a military despotism, and Mother Jones declared that “Senator Kern threw open the prison doors for me.” The militant courage of Kern held high the torch that illuminated the darkness of the darkest spot, industrially on American soil, and it will never be so dark again. His action made him powerful foes, even in his own state. But it won him something that he cherished--the undying gratitude of the workers who go down into the earth for the fuel that warms mankind. CHAPTER XVI SENATORIAL BATTLES FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE I Senator Kern carried into the senate the keen sense of social justice, and the sympathy for the lowly which had characterized him through life, and during his term in the senate there was no controversy involving the rights or interests of the working classes in which he did not take an active interest. While no service he rendered to the workers required the courage called for in the battle against feudalism in the Paint Creek settlement of West Virginia, this was by no means an isolated instance of devotion to their cause. Nor was this in any sense a pose for political effect. He had an inherent hatred of oppression of the weak on the part of the powerful, and was temperamentally incapable of understanding the indifference of others. When during the pendency of the anti-trust bill letters poured in upon him urging that trade unions be placed in the same category with trusts, formed for the purpose of arbitrarily fixing prices and exploiting the consumers, he made no attempt to conceal his disgust. The insistence of some law-makers that the rights of man should be weighed in the same scale with the privileges of property, translated in the vocabulary of some into “rights,” aroused his wrath.