and suffering, he seemed to be
impelled by precisely the same motives as those that actuated him in
bringing about the conference for peace between Russia and Japan. After
confidential communication with ex-President Cleveland, who warmly
approved his proposed plan, he offered to open the door for a settlement
of the desperate struggle between the miners and the mine-owners. As his
correspondence with ex-President Cleveland shows, he did not consider,
except incidentally, the rights and limitations of the labor organizations
on the one hand, or, upon the other, the legal position of those who
control capital, credit, transportation, and mines. He spoke for the
much-suffering public. He realized that no other than he could with any
prospect of success offer to serve as mediator.

No Respecter of Persons.

When the representatives of capital first met the President, they were
under the delusion that he had invited them to meet him because he fully
sympathized with the miners' labor organization. But at that first meeting
these kings of finance and of transportation and of the mining industry
perceived that Roosevelt gloried in his sense of manhood, and that his
courtesy to John Mitchell, and his recognition of John Mitchell's
leadership, were in no way diminished by the presence of men possessed of
immense capital and consequently of great power.

Capital was mistaken, however, in its presumption that Roosevelt was its
enemy. It was learned in the course of the several interviews with the
President that he had as firm a conviction of the necessity of
combinations of capital and credit as he had in the imperative need that
those who work with the hand should also combine for common benefit.

In private, President Roosevelt has expressed his unbounded admiration for
the courage of that business statesmanship which, within a generation, has
so mastered the West as to make its prairies rich in harvests and its
population continuous and thriving between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
But he has quite as much admiration for the native qualities, and for the
stern training and disciplining of those qualities, whereby a coal-miner
succeeded in organizing for a common purpose a vast army of men whose toil
is hidden from the sunlight, and whose faces are blackened as they come,
with lanterns on their caps, from the dismal caverns where they delve.

Mr. George W. Perkins has spoken to his friends of the impression made by
the P