Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 380
| John Mitchell said to the Southwestern miners’ convention, soon after the strike, that shows the quality of the man and of his leadership. |
| “Some men,” he said, “who own the mines think they own the men, too; and some men who work in the mines think they own them. Both are wrong. The mines belong to the owners. You belong to yourselves.” |
| Upon those who said that the President had surrendered the country, horse, foot, and dragoons, to organized labor, his action a few months later, in sending troops within the hour in which they were demanded to prevent violence by miners in Arizona, ought to have put a quietus. But it did not; they gibbered away as before. The reason is plain: they did not themselves believe what they said. The Miller case followed hard upon it, with no better effect. But the Miller case is so eloquent both of the President’s stand upon this most urgent of all questions in our day, and of his diplomacy,—which is nothing else than his honest effort, with all the light he can get upon a thing, to do the right as he sees it,—that it is worth setting down here as part of his record, and a part to be remembered. |