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Thereupon, they started. They had themselves pretty well organized - that is, they had agreed among themselves as to who would be their principal spokesman and who would come next and next and next. Anyhow, what they described was this depressed state of the coal industry, which I have just gone into, including the fact that it was depressed before the depression, and including all these problems that had entered into coal mining, which they thought made it a hopeless situation. They spoke of the great overpopulation in the coal mining areas, the large numbers of persons who looked to the mines for their employment, and the large numbers of young people growing up who looked to the mines for their future employment, and which they said, frankly and openly, they could never hope to employ. They could never hope to employ the persons who had formerly worked in the mines, and certainly they could never hope to employ the young people growing up in those areas. Something had to be done.

One person after another got up. They each described different situations. They described particular mining areas. They described the economic situation. They described the technical situation. Coal was dead product, was being crowded out of the markets, and so forth and so on. They had very little to say about labor costs. I remember that