AMONG THE COAL-MINERS

BY MARGARET BLAKE ROBINSON, NEW YORK

Editor of the Herald of Light

One summer day, when the temperature was so many degrees above zero that I was becoming skeptical as to whether there really ever was a zero, I stopped and rang the bell at a little house in a mining town in Illinois. A man came to the door smoking a comfortable looking old cob pipe and holding a well-thumbed Bible in his hand. He was small of stature, with coal black hair, well-tanned skin, intelligent features, and a pronounced English accent. I announced that I was holding evangelistic services in the little Methodist church a few blocks away, and that I would like to have him come to some of them.

"It's rather hot to preach and visit," he said; " but, then, I like the visiting preacher. I tell you if it was not for a preacher who visited me, I would be still a drunken miner—as bad as the rest of them."

Then he told me his story. It was not strikingly novel, but it gave me a new light into the hearts and lives of a class of people that I had almost come to believe were as incapable of being made spiritually white as was the coal they mined. His father had been a Methodist clergyman in England and his grandfather a local preacher ("a loaferin' preacher," as his little boy phrased it), and he himself had had a good education and religious training. He came to New York City when he was twenty one, and after vainly seeking employment in the more "genteel " occupations, he turned his face to the West and soon became a coal miner.

"Talk about the man with the hoe and the brother to the ox," he said, " well, the poor ox can't always choose his relations, but if he could, I believe he'd have cut me dead. I made good wages, but the bad influences of the mine and the saloon, which is as much to the average miner as his dinner, soon set their mark upon me. I married a good wife, but neither she nor our children could save me from my evil habits. One day a preacher called. He was not good looking (say, wife, do you remember the red carrot head and the pug nose on that fellow?)—he looked like a small edition of John L. Sullivan—but I tell yon he knew his Bible, and he was a friendly sort of a chap that you couldn't get mad at. I told him that it was none of his business whether I was a Christian or no, and said a lot of other things of the same kind, but he hooked me all the same. I gave up drink, and then I joined the Church. Now I help to pay the preacher, and I bought this house, and am paying for it little by little, so that my wife and children will have a home if anything should happen to me."

With great pride he showed me the little English garden in the rear of the house, and his wife, who was a Swede, said in broken English, but with such feeling in her voice that it was positively musical: " He's good von year now, an' 'tish like Hefen; but, oh! de udder poor miners’ wifes. Oh" (going over and putting her arm on his shoulder), " my Art'ur is chanshed so—he is so goof, so very goot!"

Arthur seemed to like that sort of treatment, and lit his pipe afresh.

Within a radius of ten miles of Danville there are several mining-towns, Westville and Kellyville being the most prominent. The men who live at a distance from the mines go to work every morning in a railroad car especially run for them by the mining company. It is a dirty, grimy car, inhabited temporarily by as dirty looking a lot of men as can be found outside the realm of "Dusty Rhodes" and " Weary Walker." Every man of them carries his pipe—a dude with a cigarette would be ridiculed in Polish, Swedish, Russian, and murdered English, and would probably be compelled (like chimneys in the East) to consume his own smoke. It seems as if every man's ambition is to have a pipe more disreputable looking than those of his neighbors, and when all are smoking in concert it is difficult to tell on which end of the train is the engine. The same scene is repeated in the evening, and a rush is made for the saloon the moment the railway car door is opened and its coal smeared passengers are back from their day's toil in the bowels of the earth.

"'Tis mighty easy to preach temperance," said a Westville miner, discussing the saloon question and the miner one day, " but it's the only decent place we fellows have to go. We have a newspaper to read, another fellow to argue with, and we can put our feet on the table and eat all the free lunch we want. We have a blooming fine fiddler who plays for us—say, wot's a fellow livin' for—all work ? Some of us ain't got no wives, and them that has—oh, say! Story books is all right for love stories, but I've seen enough of that sort o' lousiness among the miners, an' I know better'n blamin' the fellows wot doll's go home."

I might moralize with that man, but he had hard, sad facts for my theories. I could only think: " God knows it all, but the wealthy city churches do not want to know it." If they did they would reduce the salaries of their pastors and the amount of their own luxuries, and send some strong-limbed, earnest, noble young fellows out here to do for the miners what the Y. M. C. A. has done for the railroad men, only to do it better by making the atmosphere more free and easy, and to pay more real attention to the spiritual work. It will take years of lectures and paintings and classical music to educate a man up to the point where he winces at his beloved scratchy fiddle and objects to have paint stores that are prodigal of their colors supply his artistic needs; but get that man truly "in tune with the Infinite," and he will reach out after the noblest and best as naturally and instinctively as a child seeks for its milk bottle.

"I never saw a converted tramp who did not take to washing himself and buying decent clothes and patronizing the book stores," said a Christian worker to me recently. A man has to be convinced that what yon have is better and more to be enjoyed and coveted than what he has before he will want an exchange.

Westville is a small village of less than a thousand inhabitants, but it has sixteen saloons—there is an awfully dead sameness about the place; dirt, squalor, and the houses all shaped alike, of the same size, fashioned according to the same utilitarian and unartistic principles, and all owned by the mine owners. Since the formation of a miners' union the men only work eight hours a day and receive fair wages. The miners (those who dig for the coal) average about $2.50 a day, while the rock men, timbermen, cagers, and trackrmen get about $2.10. Accidents are so frequent that a miner's wife said to me: " A natural death is such a strange thing here that when one hears that So and-So is dead, they ask at once, 'When was he killed?'"

This being true, it would seem that there would be a leaning to religious things among the men, but, on the contrary, they become so inured to danger that the fear of death has no terrors for them—they live in the midst of it; it is a common visitor, almost as well known as the time keeper and cashier who appear with their accounts every week. Added terrors and added proofs of a final reckoning do not save men. "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if one rose from the dead," is as good an argument as it ever was.

Womanhood is degraded in the mining communities. A large proportion drink, and the worst examples of absolute human depravity ever forcibly or otherwise brought to my notice were two women and a man who rode on the train, near me, from Danville to Westville. Their language and actions bespoke unspeakable degradation, and I never realized until then how a woman could become so besmirched within and without and so befouled that onlookers would long for a spiritual Board of Health to remove the filth.

However the coal strikes are settled, I know that I will in future see more in the flame of the winter coal fire than science or the newspapers say is there. May you, too, see there the crying need of these workers in the heart of the earth for the riches of the everlasting Gospel of Jesus Christ. Work and pray that the Lord of Harvest send forth sowers and reapers into His harvest.