The truth about socialism

by Allan L. Benson

Suppose Mr. Wilson try to enforce the criminal clause of the Sherman Anti-Trust law and put the coal magnates into jail? Suppose he try to compel the component parts of the Coal Trust actually to compete with each other. What will happen?

This will happen. The component parts of the Coal Trust will refuse to compete. The men who are at the head of the coal companies are business associates of long standing. They know each other well, and they know well that none of them can make any money by fighting any of the others. So, when one gentleman announces a schedule of coal prices, none of the others will undercut him. All of the other coal companies will announce the same prices, because the owners of each company will also be the owners of all the other companies.

Did you ever stop to consider what position the government will then be in? Will not its hands be tied? Can the government go into court and demand that the other companies cut their prices? Suppose the other companies say they cannot cut their prices without losing money? Suppose the other companies say nothing at all, except: “This coal belongs to us. We have quite as much right to fix our own price upon it as has the government to fix its own price upon postage stamps. That other coal companies have fixed the same price we have is no more the government’s business than it is because several grocers fix the same price upon sugar, bacon, tea or coffee.”

It will then be up to the government to prove that the identicality of prices is the result of conspiracy. If conspiracy cannot be proved, the government can do nothing. In such a case, the government would never be able to prove conspiracy. The coal operators would not conspire over the telephone, or on the street corners. There would be little for them to conspire about, anyway. All of them would be financially interested in all of the companies, precisely as Mr. Rockefeller is financially interested in all of the constituent companies of the Standard Oil Company. The matter of price-fixing would probably be left to the dominating personality of the group, precisely as it is now left, more or less, to the strongest man among them. And, the prices he fixed would speedily become the prices of all.

Thus do we perceive a peculiar feature of the human mind. Individually, we know what we should like to do about the Coal Trust and the railroads. We know we should like to own and operate them. But collectively we know no such thing. We do not get together. We act as if that which each of us believes were believed by no other than himself. We are like butter that will not “gather” or bees that will not “hive.”

There is every reason why we who are paying outrageous prices for coal should get together on the matter of public ownership. The cost of mining coal is less than $2 a ton. In 1902 Mr. George F. Baer—the “Divine Right” gentleman—testified that the cost was $2, and some other witnesses testified that it was as low as $1.43 a ton. Probably no one but the coal magnates know exactly what the cost is, but now and then a fact leaks out that is illuminating. Such a fact was discovered in 1912 by a staff correspondent whom the New York World sent into the coal regions.

The World man found that the Coal Trust sells coal to its employees at a reduced price. This is not philanthropy, because if the Coal Trust charged full price for coal, it would soon be compelled to pay the miners more wages—they live like dogs, and not much more can be taken from them until it is first given to them. At any rate, the World man found that the price of coal, to miners, is only $2 a ton.

Now, it is fair to assume that the Coal Trust is not losing any money on the $2 coal that it is selling to its employees. It is more likely that it is making a nickel or two. At any rate, $2 a ton may be considered the extreme limit of the cost of mining a ton of anthracite.

Whenever the people of this country are ready to listen to the truth about the coal question, the retail price of coal can quickly be more than cut in two. The actual cost of mining coal and transporting it to any point within 500 miles of the mines probably is not more than $3 a ton. If the people, through the government, owned and operated the mines, the government could afford to sell coal at this price, plus the local cost of delivery. The wages of the miners could be doubled—as they should be—and coal could still be sold by the government at $5 a ton. In any calculation about the coal problem, the miners should not be forgotten. The Coal Trust will never take care of them, but they have a right to demand that they shall be taken care of.

The business of mining coal is dangerous and disagreeable to the last degree. Coal miners, when they are at work, seldom see the day. They go from the night of the surface to the night of the mines. They breathe such dust as never blew in the filthiest street. When a fall of slate comes or an explosion of firedamp, their mangled bodies are all that is left for their weeping widows and orphans at the mouth of the mine. If they escape death by accident, they cannot escape the death that comes from the unhealthfulness of their calling. No life insurance company wants much to do with a coal miner except at the highest rates. No tuberculosis exhibit is complete without the blackened lungs of a coal miner in a jar of alcohol. There is nothing for a coal miner when he is alive but a cheerless existence of the greatest drudgery—and nothing for him when he is dead but an unmarked grave on the hillside. Yet 76,000 human beings thus spend their lives in the anthracite coal mines, and hundreds of other thousands in the bituminous mines. All of this great toll of human misery that the nation may burn coal.