Now the free lands were gone.

In earlier days a man who began with pick and shovel might have come to own a mine.

That outlet too was now closed, as regards the immense majority, and few, if any, of the one hundred and fifty thousand mine workers could ever aspire to enter the small circle of men who held in their grasp the great anthracite industry.

The majority of the men who earned wages in the coal industry, if they wished to progress at all, were compelled to progress not by ceasing to be wage-earners, but by improving the conditions under which all the wage-earners in all the industries of the country lived and worked, as well of course, as improving their own individual efficiency.
Another change which had come about as a result of the foregoing was a crass inequality in the bargaining relation between the employer and the individual employee standing alone.

The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies, which employed their tens of thousands, could easily dispense with the services of any particular miner.