terms. It may be added that the award reduced the price of mining in the Tuscarawas field to the level which had already come to obtain in competing fields. The miners of that district protested chiefly because they had been accustomed to wages higher than those paid elsewhere.

Shortly after, one of the coal companies in the district, which was not a member of the operators' association, made an individual advance of nine cents a ton, in order to induce its employees not to protest against the company's rejection of the usual practice of having a check-weighman at the scales. The discontent of the employees of the other mines was much increased by this advance, and they appealed to the general officers of the national association to be absolved from the decision of the umpire. After hearing their arguments the board decided to release them from the award. Immediately thereafter a formal demand was made upon the operators for eighty cents a ton; and early in April, 1875, a conference was held in Akron to discuss this demand. Mr. James Ford Rhodes, Mark Hanna's brother-in-law, presided at this meeting.

Mr. Hanna himself, as the head of the operators' association, argued the case for the employers, and his argument is worth quoting in part, because of the light it throws upon his opinions even at this early date. He admitted that the action of the Crawford Coal Company, in raising wages, had given the miners a grievance; but he argued that they would do better to stand by the award. The operators, other than the Crawford Coal Company, had refused to permit the abolition of the check-weighman, because the miners had a right to that protection; and they should not be penalized for standing by their employees in this matter by being asked or forced to raise wages. In addition he made a general argument in favor of the arbitration of industrial disputes, and of what would now be called collective bargaining between associations of employers and employees.

The men insisted on an advance, and when they began to strike the operators yielded. But not for long. On August 1 the operators succeeded in reducing the price from eighty to seventy-five cents-which prevailed in the valley until March, 1876. Then a further reduction to sixty-five cents was proposed. The officers of the union advised the miners to compromise

on seventy cents, but they were ignored and a strike declared. The operators attempted to break the strike. They collected some miners in and around Cleveland, and with them manned a mine, situated a few miles south of Massillon. This mine is described as the Warmington, and belonged either to George H. Warmington, a partner of Mr. Hanna, or else to Rhodes & Co. In either event it would have been operated by the firm. About the middle of April the operators proposed to place more men at work on the mine, and on April 14 a second batch of strikebreakers was sent out under the direction of Mr. Warmington himself. Several hundred of the strikers were holding a meeting near the mine when the strangers arrived, and an orderly meeting was converted by the sight of the "scabs" into a howling mob. They made a rush for the car. Accounts vary as to precisely what occurred thereafter. According to the "History of the Coal Miners," from which I have already quoted, Mr. Warmington ordered the strikers to halt, and threatened them with a pistol. A contemporary account in the Cleveland Leader makes no mention of such a weapon. At any rate, the miners rushed forward, knocked Mr. Warmington down, and would have beaten him to death, had not two of their own number, Bennett Brown and William Ellwood, saved his life at the risk of their own.

Disorder prevailed throughout the district. The sheriff was helpless and petitioned the Governor, Rutherford B. Hayes, for troops. After some hesitation a company of the militia was sent to Massillon and placed in the Warmington mine. The night following their appearance the strikers captured the other mines thereabouts operated by Rhodes & Co., and set them on fire. The soldiers, however, soon suppressed the violence. Many arrests were made, and one miner was shot while attempting to escape. The disorder caused the operators to coöperate more vigorously, and in the end the strikers had to return to work with their pay diminished to sixty-five cents a ton. Within a couple of years their wages had been cut by twosevenths.

Feeling ran high against the disorderly miners, and it was not easy to find an attorney to defend them. Finally their de- fence was undertaken by William McKinley, Jr., the case being

tried at Canton, the county seat. His pleading was so successful that out of twenty-three indicted men only one was convicted, and he was sent to the penitentiary for three years. The trial took place just before the convention which gave to McKinley his first nomination for Congress.

Inasmuch as Mark Hanna, as the head of the operators' association, was in Canton during the trial, his first meeting with McKinley may have taken place on this occasion; but if such is the case the meeting made no impression on either of the two men. Mr. Hanna, in an article on "McKinley as I Knew Him," published after the President's death, explicitly states that he has no recollection of his first meeting with his friend. He believes it took place "early in the seventies" as well it might, for his business interests must have frequently taken him to the region in which McKinley was a rising and popular young lawyer and politician. Judge George E. Baldwin, who was associated with McKinley as counsel of the accused miners, states that he is "sure" that the meeting at Canton during the trial was not the first meeting. He knew both men well throughout many years, and neither of them ever spoke to him about the matter-as they would be likely to do, because of his intimate connection with the case as leading counsel. In any event, even if the first meeting did occur at Canton in June, 1876, during the trial, it was merely a casual contact, which resulted in no closer association for many years.

Such is the story of the one serious disagreement with their employees in which any of Mr. Hanna's companies were entangled. If the miners were hardly treated on this occasion, that was the result of general conditions, which no individual was powerful enough to check. Mr. Hanna himself, at a time when labor-unions were regarded with even greater disfavor by employers than they are at present, was friendly to the unions. John James, the secretary of the Miners' National Association in 1875 and 1876, states that "he was the first mining operator in the bituminous fields of the United States to recognize the cardinal principle of arbitration in the settlement of wages, disputes, and the first also to recognize the 'Miners' National Association."" During the whole of their intercourse Mr. James found him to be "one of the most intelligent, con

siderate and conservative" of the operators. He was always accessible to the officers of the union, and he always freely recognized the "real rights and interests of labor."

The reader must not understand that Mr. Hanna became an active advocate of labor organization and went out of his way to favor unions among his employees. His early record merely shows that he was much more liberal than the ordinary employer in recognizing the laborer's right to organize, and much more quick to perceive the advantages to both parties of collective bargaining and regular methods of industrial conciliation. But the chief fact is that he applied to his own business the method of always keeping close to his employees, always listening respectfully to their demands, of always granting the just claims of his men as a body and of always treating needy individuals with generosity. At a time when many American employers overlooked the fact that their relation to their employees was a human as well as an economic relation, Mark Hanna always treated them as far as he could as men. The subsequent interest which he took in labor problems, and the subsequent policy which he advocated as a means of avoiding industrial disputes, were both of them a result and an expression of his own practice as an employer.

CHAPTER X

CHARACTERISTICS IN BUSINESS

MARK HANNA has been described as an industrial pioneer. An analytic account of his characteristics as a business man will confirm the description. The typical pioneer of the period of rapid industrial expansion after the Civil War differed in certain respects from both the agricultural and industrial pioneers of the generation preceding the war, but the differences between the two types are insignificant compared to the fundamental similarities. Mr. Hanna was not only the sort of industrial pioneer whose methods and achievements illuminate and dignify the economic life of his generation, but he remained true to his type, even after many of his own early associates had departed from it. His political career and system, as well as his business career, cannot be properly understood except as the expression and result of his point of view and his experience as an industrial pioneer.

Mark Hanna's salient characteristic in business was initiative. He was essentially, if not exclusively, an entrepreneur. He broke new ground. He started and developed enterprises. The Middle West of the seventies and eighties was seething with industrial and commercial opportunities - mines to be developed, factories to be started, lines of trade to be laid out and established, mechanical improvements to be introduced and perfected, and commerce to be organized with increasing efficiency and economy. In order to take advantage of these opportunities a man needed an aggressive will, an abundant energy, and an alert, shrewd, and comprehensive mind. Such qualifications Mark Hanna conspicuously possessed, and they found full and effective expression in the policy and organization of Rhodes & Co., and M. A. Hanna & Co. Their policy aimed at the encouragement of enterprises which would produce commodities to be handled and sold by the firm; and its exe