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“Yeah, there's Charlie O'Neill. He was a miner and is a good coal operator. There's ‘So-and-So' and he's a good coal operator.”

In other words, they began to see that some of them were good coal operators. My chief function that noon was to persuade them that they had a duty to perform, that all they had to do was to get their courage up, that what they were lacking was to get their courage up, that what they were lacking was courage and nerve. I just had to say, “Don't give them away.” I said to one or two of them, “Suppose you start this. You've all talked about being afraid of socialism all your lives, and now you come and give your mines to the government and tell the government to own them. That's public ownership of the means of production, isn't it? That's socialism.”

They hadn't thought of that. They kept saying, “But it's all right. It has to be.”

“Well,” I said, “suppose we take over the coal mines, because you give them to us and practically force us to take them; to be sure if you don't operate the coal mines, the time will come when the government will. I know because in a great emergency it would become a public necessity to get coal. If you all abandoned and abdicated, certainly somebody from the government would come in and dig out the coal in order to get it to heat the houses, hospitals and make the