time. No serious leader
outside made any objection. The one concern of everybody was to stop
the panic, and everybody was overjoyed that I was willing to take the
responsibility of stopping it upon my own shoulders. But a few months
afterward, the panic was a thing of the past. People forgot the
frightful condition of alarm in which they had been. They no longer had
a personal interest in preventing any interference with the stoppage of
the panic. Then the men who had not dared to raise their voices until
all danger was past came bravely forth from their hiding places and
denounced the action which had saved them. They had kept a hushed
silence when there was danger; they made clamorous outcry when there was
safety in doing so.

Just the same course would have been followed in connection with the
Anthracite Coal Strike if I had been obliged to act in the fashion I
intended to act had I failed to secure a voluntary agreement between the
miners and the operators. Even as it was, my action was remembered with
rancor by the heads of the great moneyed interests; and as time went by
was assailed with constantly increasing vigor by the newspapers these
men controlled. Had I been forced to take possession of the mines,
these men and the politicians hostile to me would have waited until the
popular alarm was over and the popular needs met, just as they waited
in the case of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; and then they
would have attacked me precisely as they did attack me as regards the
Tennessee Coal and Iron Company.

Of course, in labor controversies it was not always possible to champion
the cause of the workers, because in many cases strikes were called
which were utterly unwarranted and were fought by methods which cannot
be too harshly condemned. No straightforward man can believe, and no
fearless man will assert, that a trade union is always right. That
man is an unworthy public servant who by speech or silence, by direct
statement or cowardly evasion, invariably throws the weight of his
influence on the side of the trade union, whether it is right or wrong.
It has occasionally been my duty to give utterance to the feelings of
all right thinking men by expressing the most emphatic disapproval of
unwise or even immoral notions by representatives of labor. The man is
no true democrat, and if an American, is unworthy of the traditions
of his country who, in problems calling for the exercise of a moral
judgment, fail