Read The Coal War for Free Online Page B

students to study! Between athletics and fraternity life, it was so difficult to get them to study anything!
    Hal and Lipinsky took counsel, and called on the chancellor with a new and subtle proposition. The authorities would not permit a “Socialist” organization; but what if the students should meet to discuss, not Socialism, but social problems in general? Surely the authorities would not forbid that! Seeing the authorities begin to weaken, Hal pressed his advantage, stating that he intended to invite friends to his rooms to discuss social problems, unless this procedure was expressly forbidden.
    So once a week there was a gathering of students, and a discussion so exciting that it was sometimes difficult to get rid of the discussers. Even the professors took to coming, and taking part in the proceedings on equal terms with their students. A brand new experience to these gentlemen—to see American college boys taking ideas seriously enough to get angry over them! The time came when Hal’s rooms would hardly hold these gatherings. The most aloof and fashionable men in the student-body, pillars of fraternity-life like “Bob” Creston and Laurence Arthur, were first drawn in by curiosity and then drawn out by arguments, until you might hear them defending themselves and their privileges under the very thinnest veils of economic formula!

[12]
    The climax came near the end of the year; when Dan Hogan, the notorious “I.W.W.” leader, happened to be in Western City. The brilliant idea occurred to these young collegiate revolutionists that the students might be interested to know what the “I.W.W.” had to report about the state of the country. So first they invited him—and then they announced that he was coming.
    Never would Hal forget the scene in his rooms that night; a cultured leisure-class audience, packed like sardines in a box, and a one-eyed, battle-scarred old veteran of the class-war, backed against the wall facing them. He had not wanted to come, he told them; he had no interest in leisure-class audiences, no faith in them; he was only wasting his breath, talking to them about things they could never understand. But the boys had insisted, and so here he was; he stood like a mangy old bear at bay, growling at them for their blindness and indifference to the horror of the life of millions upon whose toil they fed. He told them what he had seen and known—not because it was any use to tell them, but because his mind was full to bursting with it, because his soul was shaken to the deeps with it.
    It was facts that “Big Dan” told; no one could doubt that they were facts, no human imagination could have invented such things! He told of starvation and oppression; he pictured masses of men and women driven to desperation, flaming out in blind revolt, crushed into submission by club and bayonet and machine-gun. He told of prison-hells where men were driven insane, of bull-pens where men, and women too, were beaten and starved and frozen, or left to die of loathsome diseases. He told of the brutality of police and soldiery, of the corruption of courts and juries—the whole enormous, relentless machine of oppression which was “government” to the man underneath. He pictured the long agonies, the sacrifices and martyrdoms of labor’s nameless and forgotten heroes. He did not plead for them—he was too powerful for that; in the midst of his most moving cry of despair, of yearning for deliverance for his people, his scorn and fury would flash out again. He would hail the mighty hosts of labor, marching to their final and inevitable triumph! His voice would rise like a trumpet-call to this battle of the morrow.
    The news of this meeting spread like wild-fire through the college; it spread farther—to the trustees, to the politicians, to the Chamber of Commerce. The chancellor sent for Hal, and in a state of the wildest agitation denounced this