Last week from the dank black recesses of the mines, great brown rats, black with coal-dust, scampered. Up long, inclined shafts they crawled, their beady eyes blinking in the light. Not long before, the miners, their faces smudged a ghastly grey, had straggled wearily up the shafts. The soft coal strike began in the central competitive area, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and in the adjoining states of Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
About 200,000 union miners left their jobs, most of them with money in the bank, some...
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