“I ask your attention, therefore, for a few moments to my advocacy of the rights of labor. I stand here as the champion of the rights of labor—as the advocate of those who desire to work and who have been prevented from doing so. I stand here to arraign before you a class of two or three men out of every one hundred, who, by their machinations and by their agitation, have held in absolute idleness and starvation thousands and thousands of men for months. Why, gentlemen, look at what we have undergone. When people object to a profit of twenty-five or thirty cents upon the ton of coal, I ask them to look at what those who mine coal have had to submit to during the last six months. I have had printed for your use a statement, from the daily reports coming to me during the strike, of the outrages in the coal region. Here I want to correct an impression that goes out to the public, that these outrages are intended to injure the property of the employer. They are not. We do not believe that they are. They are perpetrated for no other purpose than to intimidate the workingmen themselves and to prevent them from going to work. I shall not read the list; it is at your service; and you can look over it and see the position we have occupied for months. But let me mention a few of the glaring instances of tyranny and oppression. At a colliery, called the Ben Franklin Colliery, the employés of which were perfectly satisfied with their wages, had accepted the reduction early in the season, and were working peacefully and contentedly, the torch of the incendiary was applied to the breaker at night. These men, having families to support, working there contentedly and peacefully, were driven out of employment by a few dangerous men, simply for the purpose of preventing them from earning their daily bread. I had some interest in the subject of the amount of their wages, and I asked the owner of the colliery what his miners were actually earning at the time when they were prevented from working by the burning of the structure in which they were employed, and he told me that the lowest miner on his pay-list earned sixty dollars a month, and the highest one hundred and thirty dollars; and yet, although these men were peaceful, law-abiding men, they were driven out of employment by an incendiary fire. At another colliery, within five or six miles of this, a band of twenty or thirty men, in the evening—almost in broad daylight—went to the breaker, and by force drove the men away and burnt the structure down. It belonged to a poor man. It was a small operation. The savings of his lifetime were probably gone, and his own employés, who had nothing against him, and who were perfectly willing to work, were thrown out of employment, and probably remain out of employment to this day.”