With the sending of National Guardsmen into the Taylorville strike area in Illinois, another step is taken along the road that led to the sordid history of Harlan and Bell Counties. The circumstances are substantially the same: miners refuse to work for oppressively low wages; owners, faced with a labor crisis at their own boom period, hire substitutes, who are attacked and prevented from entering the shafts; as a last resort the militia is evoked to "protect lives and property."

It is a universal tendency in such cases to shower sympathy on the workers, whose pickets are broken up, whose assemblies are forbidden, and whose political activity is curtailed. Much sympathy is doubtless deserved, but it is a mistake to assume that the operators have no reasonable case. The cut throat competition of small independent mines demands of owners a drastic economy even in prosperous times. When conditions are poor and orders scarce that need is even more pressing. Wages must be cut if the mines are to operate at all; and then as always, the present impasse develops.

When two parties, equally right from their own concept, are diametrically opposed, solution of the problem can hardly be expected independent of an outside agency with sufficient power to enforce its decisions. In the present issue the state government is obviously that outside agency, but the faults of its mediation are fatal to solution. State governments invariably intercede on behalf of the operators, exasperating the miners beyond the possibility of conciliation. Moreover, a state control of mining operations would inevitably lead to unfair disadvantage of operations under its direction. The mining problem has too long been crying for Federal intervention. That the United States has failed to see this need seems ample justification for the socialistic denunciation of "vested interests."