Show II DESTITUTION FACES F CES STRIKERS Rev Re FT Pr Thomas Hazelton Let Letter Letter ter to New York Journal Last Tuesday morning I 1 made my first visitation to a miners home and the homes of many miners There was ras rasa a romance and sadness in the visita tion for as the Journal remarked it was a a pilgrimage to the shrine of knowledge and the shrine of hearts The romance was in the retroactive as well as the present and the future The first visit had a romance about Jt the scene of Ireland and America the picture of their young marriage In far off orr Donegal Done l in the pure air of the Island of Saints This old couple were married nearly fifty years ago in the Green Isle and an they dreamed of a sunny home borne in free America Think of the darkness of their struggle in the dark coal mines of Pennsylvania Yet the old man and his venerable wife were noble to look upon in the decline of ot their years He looked like a ii vener venerable venerable venerable able patriarch surrounded as he was vas by his boys The couple had fought a dark fight in the coal region They had raised up children to God sober honest boys three of them now in the of stalwart manhood for their rights and the rights ri of their fellow fe or wage workers un unwilling unwillIng unwilling willing to be the slaves of at any man or corporative slaves in this free land the joint support of their venerable par parents en ts fearing no man and believing in God sorrowing that the avarice of coal barons and railroad kings forbids them the responsibility lIb of holy marriage for they fear they cannot bring up their children and ana educate them In their present condition and they dread the step lest God should bless them with offspring and arid they would be obliged to blight their young brightness and send them into the darkness of the mines What a blessing it is to the priest to come near the hearts of the neole in humble e life Ute cast cas In heroic molds What particularly struck me in the homes of the miners of the South Side mines was that the houses are more roomy and have little pieces of ground around them while interiorly they are kept neat and simple This Interior neatness is an act of the tenants ex cx exteriorly exteriorly they the are shells They might be forty thirty or twenty years old There Is not a n vestige of paint on them and In the severe winter of four or five months when the snow is on the ground and the wind Is howling and the people get out with difficulty I wonder how they can exist in these wind holes creations of the companies and the railroads I r noticed in hi a number of these of the coal company for which the company receives 4 1 a a month and more the miners have haye enormous stoves larger than the ordin ordinary ordinary ordinary ary range and big enough to do the cooking of a small hotel beautifully polished the steel frames evidently kept bright with emory polish The miners tell me each of these consumes consume in winter at least a ton of at coal a month huts or cottages all I i entered have three rooms and a a shanty shant r attached to the rear of the house One i of the miners told me they were obliged oblige to have a stove in each room and even evem then they could not at times have haye sufficient warmth A man respected by all who knew knee r him said when I spoke about the thi m ranges being large enough for a hotel that last winter he had two o of them then I going and a parlor furnace with a pipe pIp S running upstairs nevertheless he said we had nights when we feared to go goto goto g to bed lest we should freeze to death and we slept in our clothes and hUgged the ranges to keep warm |