In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of enormously valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellers and other Protestant exploiters. The men who work these mines, some twelve or fifteen thousand in number, come from all the nations of Europe and Asia, and their fate is that of the average wage-slave. I do not ask anyone to take my word, but present sworn testimony, taken by the United States Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914. Here is the way the Italian miners live, as described in a doctor's report:
Houses up the canyon, so-called, of which eight are habitable, and forty-six simply awful; they are disreputably disgraceful. I have had to remove a mother in labor from one part of the shack to another to keep dry.
And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former superintendent of the Sociological Department of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company:
The C.F. & I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and dug-outs that are unfit for the habitation of human beings and are little removed from the pig-sty make of dwellings. And the people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty. Frequently the population is so congested that whole families are crowded into one room; eight persons in one small room was reported during the year.
And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses whom the Rockefellers employ:
The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as most uncouth, ignorant, immoral, and in many instances, the most brutal set of men that I have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.
Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his weights, and applies for the protection which the law of the state allows him. What happens then?
"When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of the super he was getting too smart."
"And he got what?"
"He got it in the neck, generally."