Therefore Christian humanity in the present situation should choose between two things: either to continue along the path of wickedness in which existing civilization gives the greatest number of benefits to the smallest number of people, keeping the others in poverty and slavery; or immediately, without postponing it to a future more or less remote, to renounce in part, or wholly, the advantages which this civilization has given to certain privileged ones, thereby preventing the liberation of the majority of men from poverty and serfdom. _A Coal Miner’s Story_ BY CHARLES S. MOODY, M. D. The average worthy citizen reclining beside an open coal-grate, reading the press accounts of the latest coal strike, has little interest in the matter further than his interest in the probable effect of the labor disturbance upon the price of his winter’s fuel. When he reaches that part of the narrative that tells of the troops having been ordered to the scene of action, the powerful arm of the military invoked to put down the uprising among the working-men, he heaves a sigh of relief that now the strike will be of short duration and the price of coal will not be advanced. Seldom does he consider the matter from the standpoint of the man who mines the coal. Were that one big lump glowing warmly in the centre of the grate gifted with the power of speech, it would tell a tale that might well harrow up the feelings of the most callous. Alas! it is dumb, just as the man who dug it out of the bowels of the earth is dumb. It glows its heat away, crumbles into gray ash, and the worthy citizen retires to his rest with mind untroubled by any unpleasant thought of want or penury among those who go down into the unwholesome deeps of the mine and toil all day shut out from God’s gracious light that he and you and I may enjoy comfort and warmth. At one time of my life the relentless wheel of Fate in its ceaseless revolving whirled me to its nadir, and spilled me into the squalid chaos of a coal-mining town, and, not content with that, hurled me into the nethermost hell of all that seething vortex of toil and poverty. That the worthy citizen may see something of that side of the shield—the side sable—I will attempt to tell it, not with the graces of one skilled of pen, but in all its plain, naked, glaring hideousness. At this point allow me to crave pardon for the frequent use of the personal pronoun. I am speaking as a coal-miner, and can tell it better by using the first person.