Another Great Man

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 3, 15 January 1903, Page 18

Another Great Man

Another great man, forced to the frcmt by this gigantic struggle, is Mr. John Mitchell, the president of the mine workers. Like so many of the great men of America, Mr. Mitchell is of Irish descent. He was born in 1869, and lost his mother at two years of age and his father at four. He was then left to the care of a stopmother. His schooling was meagre, and was obtained at intervals when he could be spared from the farm. At 13 years of age he entered the coal mines at his birthplace, Braidswood, Illinois. When 22 years of age he married Miss Katherine O'Rourke. A recent interviewer thus describes him — ' He is a full-faced, clean-shaven man, with deep-set, luminous eyes, a firm mouth and a high forehead, with the brown, almost black, hair brushed carelessly on the right side, as if by the fingers.' So much for the personal appearance of a man who is destined to play a prominent part on the industrial stage of tho near future. He is described as a new typo of labor leader. ' He is not a demagogue, a haranguer, a typical agitator. His public speeches and statements show this They do not overflow with flowery metaphors, a^ealing to the passions and prejudices of his followers, but for the most part they arc business-like presentations of conditions as he sees them appealing to the reason. He

means to organise labor, to check the tendency to lower wages, to enforce a living wage, for less than which no laborer should work.' The present aim is to organise thoroughly the 453,000 mine employees in the United States, and that he will succeed no one doubts who knows him. His work is important to New Zealand in one respect, which is that the example of this Colony is rapidly making itself felt in the United States. There is no country in the world where arbitration and conciliation as seen in this Colony is watched with greater interest than in the States. The great obstacle at present is in the constitution of labor courts. Under the present judicial system obtaining there no confidence could be felt in the civil courts. At least that is what the labor leaders say, and it is an indirect compliment to the colonial judicature. In shaping the new movement Mr. Mitchell will take a prominent part, because he represents a new school of thought and action, thai is in America, but not so in the colonies. He asserts that labor is simply a commodity, which the worker is willing to sell and the employer wishes to buy. The rate at which this commodity is to be purchased is to be established by bargaining. From that point of view the strike was simply a refusal on the part of the miners to sell their labor except at what they considered a fair price, and 147,000 men and boys fought for this principle for five months.