Out of these men the new leaders will be chosen.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEN WHO LOOK
During the recent coal strike in England, as at all times in the world, heroes abounded.
The trouble with most of us during the coal strike was not in our not having heroes, but in our not being quite sure which they were.
Davy McEwen, a miner who stood out against the whole countryside, and went to his work every day in defiance of thousands of men on the hills about him trying to stop him, and hundreds of thousands of men all over England trying to scare him, was not a hero to Mr. Josiah Wedgewood. Mr. Josiah Wedgewood one day in the height of the conflict, from his seat in the House of Commons, rose in his might—and before the face of the nation called Davy McEwen a traitor to his class.
Sir Arthur Markham, one of the largest of the mine-owners, in the height of the conflict between the mine-owners and the miners over wages, rose in the House and declared that, in his opinion as a mine-owner, the mine-owners were wrong and the miners were right, and that the mine-owners could afford to pay better wages, and should yield to the men.
He was called a traitor to his class.
At the last moment in the coal strike, when the Government had done its best, and when the labour leaders still proposed to hold up England and defy the Government until they got their way, Stephen Walsh, one of the leaders of the miners, stood up in the face of a million miners and said he would not go on with the others against the Government. "It is now time for the trades union men to return to work. We have done what we could. Our citizenship should be higher than our trades unionship, and with me, as long as I am a trades union man, it will be."