The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-07-25
IN STRIKE TIMES.
The Altered Appearance of the Goa
 Country.

The Altered Appearance of the Coal Country.
 Just now in anthracite coal re- gions every man has a clean face In
 ordinary times, the first thing which strikes a visitor to the mining villages is the dirt The men on their way home from work have faces and hands like dusty ebony. The children are still grimy, but that is because they are still picking coal from the great culm dumps. The houses are still dingy, for eight weeks of rain cannot wash off the stain which the wind has for years borne from the dumps, or the reek that was vonited from the air shaft of the mine. The streets are still filtered with with filth In fact, there are some coal-mining villages where the great strike is now on that deserve to be classed as slums.
 This condition of affairs exists in re- zion by nature as beautiful as any in the world. The mountain of Pennsylvania are rugged. They were once covered , with noble trees and splendid laurels while the streams were fringeo with | rhododendrons or silvery birches. in the older mining districts every vestige | of the forest has disappeared. The the surface is furrowed by floods or
 fallen into gaping holes by reason of ! the sinkages in the mines below. In l 11,o 1a 1 tree is to be found-nothing but the
 bare rock or barren earth.
 | Another fact likely to be vididly inn pressed upon the visitor is the number of crippled persons on the streets. Coal mining is dangerous business. Last year more than five hundred men were
 killed and over twelve hundred injured | in the hard coal mines of Pennsyl- vania. The expectation of life of the man who enters the mines is fifteen years. But it is not only by pre-
 mature blasts or by the falling of the roof in the chambers or through some
 mischance in the operation of the
 dangerous machinery that death comes,
 but the very life of the miner under ground and the breathing of the air surcharged with gas or particles of coal l dust mean shortened lives. A pe-
 culiar form of consumption, known as
 miners asthma, kills almost as many | victims as the dangerous machinery or the gas, and no count is made of
 these deaths by the state bureau of
 mining in mining in their columns of statistics. The average boy who enters | the mines at 15-and many enter long
 before that age-has finished his use
 full life at 30. In fifteen years after he
 has entered the breaker or the mine he 1 is either dead or an invalid.
 Physical injury Is not the only one | from which the miners suffer. The hard conditions of their life and the fre- quent accidents which deprive the fam ! fly of it's head and bread-winner often compel the boys of the family to enter the coal breaker at very early age. Hence, illiteracy prevails to an appall- ing degree. The law forbids the en- ployment of boys in the breaker under twelve years of age, but neglects to
 bring the breakers under the jurisdic- { ton of the factory inspector, so that the law is practically dead letter. It
 would be hard to say how much of the
 lawlessness which accompanies strike
 in the mining region is due to the ig-
 norance or viciousness of those whose
 education has been interrupted If not
 rendered impossible by their being forced into the demoralizing school of the breaker long before they had
 reached the legal age of twelve years.
 Another fact which a stranger would notice is that the men of mining vil-
 lage are mostly foreigners. Almost all the unskilled labor is performed by Italians, Poles or Hungarians. Even the skilled labor of mining coal is done for the most part by these foreigners,
 or by immigrants from Great Britain and the sons of these foreign-born i'm migrants. The petty bosses about the mines are mostly English, Welsh or Irish or their sons who have grown up in this country. Although thousands of farmers boys of pure American stock nave flocked into the anthracite dis tricts, few or none are to be found
 working underground. As the sons of