THE HUGE PROFITS FROM THE COAL MINES.
No one knows or can ascertain the exact profits of the Vanderbilts and of other railroad owners from their control of both the anthracite, and largely the bituminous, coal mines. As has been noted, the railroad magnates cloud their trail by operating through subsidiary companies. That their extortions reach hundreds of millions of dollars every year is a patent enough fact. Some of the accompaniments of this process of extortion have been referred to;— the confiscation, on the one hand, of the labor of the whole consuming population by taxing from them more and more of the products of their labor by repeated increases in the price of coal, and, on the other, the confiscation of the labor of the several hundred thousand miners who are compelled to work for the most precarious wages, and in conditions worse, in some respects, than chattel slavery.
But not alone is labor confiscated. Life is also immolated. The yearly sacrifice of life in the coal mines of the United States is steadily growing. The report for 1908 of the United States Geological Survey showed that 3,125 coal miners were killed by accidents in the current year, and that 5,316 were injured. The number of fatalities was 1,033 more than in 1906. "These figures," the report explains, "do not represent the full extent of the disasters, as reports were not received from certain States having no mine inspectors." Side by side with these appalling figures must be again brought out the fact adverted to already: that the owners of the coal mines have at all times violently opposed the passage of laws drafted to afford greater safeguard for life in the working of the mines. Being the owners, at the same time, of the railroads, their opposition in that field to life-saving improvements has been as consistent.
Improvements are expensive; human life is contemptibly cheap; so long as there is a surplus of labor it is held to be commercial folly to go to the unnecessary expense of protecting an article of merchandise which can be had so cheaply. Human tragedies do not enter into the making of profit and loss accounts; outlays for mechanical appliances do. Assuredly this is a business age wherein profits must take precedence over every other consideration, which principle has been most elaborately enunciated and established by a long list of exalted court decisions. Yea, and the very magnates whose power rests on force and fraud are precisely those who insidiously dictate what men shall be appointed to these omniscient courts, before whose edicts all men are expected to bow in speechless reverence. [Footnote: This is far from being a rhetorical figure of speech. Witness the dictating of the appointment and nominations of judges by the Standard Oil Company (which now owns immense railroad systems and industrial plants) as revealed by certain authentic correspondence of that trust made public in the Presidential campaign of 1908.]