The daily Nome industrial worker., 1918-02-05
IN WEST VIRGINIA.


 yesterdays issue to the effect that the West Virginia Legislature at it's last session pasesd a so-called "Anti-IdleneSs law under the pre- text of aiding the war by putting professional vagrants to work Under this act it is unlawful for any citizen of the State of West Virginia between the ages of 16 and 60 to fail to work a certain number of hours each day. And now the inevitable (which is the ulterior motive why such an ob- noXious bill to the laboring-class was passcd) has happened--tke act is being used to break strikes.
 In the Madison and Clothier coal fields are franspiring scenes which call for comment.A wave of (so- called) patriotic anti-union feeling seems to have been poured forth by the bloted coal barons and their iickspittle spellbinding blatherskites, as well as their spineless satellitious politicians of the legislature whereat such a bill was passed, with the intent of di- Verting attention iron! the real is- sues which unionism involves. Con slider the facts in these West Yir- ginia coal fields cases which are as fOllows:-practically all the employees there are Americans to a greater extent than prevails in the Pennsylvania and in the high\r paid coal regions of the North. The miners in West Virginia have been living in stata which hdrdcrs so close to absolute poverty that for scientific purposes it can be considered such. Coed Americans some of them; whose fathers and fathers fathers have been instru- mental in establishing the United States of America. They worked for a living in the mines, which were opened On the mountain sides of their native haunts. They toil- cd under distressing conditions but complained not, nor did they ask what became of the profits which arose from their labor. Who owned the mines mattered not to them; apparently they did not con- cern themselves in the remotest degree about it, until this recently social life of the mining camps to the dephts, when Capitalism with it's array of subservient satellites. And the irony of this matter is that practically all the capital invested in the Madison and Clothier coal fields is held by financial Magnates in London, Paris and Naples. Good Americans like "Elkins,' few years ago disposed of q consider a ble amount of stock in these fields while in Europe, the lime his handsome daughter was making goo-goo eyes at the Duke of Ar 1buzzi. His partner Davies while visiting in London at that time, also sloughed off a large amount of stock to Lord Northcliffe. Pa triotism don't go then worth a cent It is all right to claim to be patriotic, when all that is necessa- ry is, a long distance gaze toward 9Ge battlefield, but that buffers no parsnips; neither does it signify that whenever we hear some one allude to themselves, Im patriotic, or he (the other fellow) is pro German, that the exalted one is in all sincerity responsible for what he says, and such statements should be digested with a grain of salt, yes oft times with a hand full of salt. The way one can look at this matter is this. Here are good American Citizens, decend- ;aris cf the best and hravest of the earliest of the earliest pioneers, the men who made the wilderness to blossom, and fought gallantly 10 uphold the banner of freedom when it wes surrounded by daring and by desperate and by tyrannical foes. They lived in this mining camp as their fathers and their grandfathers and their grand fathers fathers had done before them They lived and worked and fought Now comes along such an