have to take possession of the mines on my
own initiative by means of General Schofield and the regulars. I was all
ready to act, and would have done so without the slightest hesitation or
a moment's delay if the negotiations had fallen through. And my action
would have been entirely effective. But it is never well to take drastic
action if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less
drastic fashion; and, although this was a minor consideration, I was
personally saved a good deal of future trouble by being able to avoid
this drastic action. At the time I should have been almost unanimously
supported. With the famine upon them the people would not have tolerated
any conduct that would have thwarted what I was doing. Probably no man
in Congress, and no man in the Pennsylvania State Legislature, would
have raised his voice against me. Although there would have been
plenty of muttering, nothing would have been done to interfere with the
solution of the problem which I had devised, _until the solution was
accomplished and the problem ceased to be a problem_. Once this was
done, and when people were no longer afraid of a coal famine, and began
to forget that they ever had been afraid of it, and to be indifferent as
regards the consequences to those who put an end to it, then my enemies
would have plucked up heart and begun a campaign against me. I doubt if
they could have accomplished much anyway, for the only effective remedy
against me would have been impeachment, and that they would not have
ventured to try.[*]

[*] One of my appointees on the Anthracite Strike Commission
was Judge George Gray, of Delaware, a Democrat whose
standing in the country was second only to that of Grover
Cleveland. A year later he commented on my action as
follows:

"I have no hesitation in saying that the President of the United States
was confronted in October, 1902, by the existence of a crisis more grave
and threatening than any that had occurred since the Civil War. I mean
that the cessation of mining in the anthracite country, brought about
by the dispute between the miners and those who controlled the greatest
natural monopoly in this country and perhaps in the world, had
brought upon more than one-half of the American people a condition
of deprivation of one of the necessaries of life, and the probable
continuance of the dispute threatened not only the comfort and health,
but the safety and good ord