was only thinking of the coal-veins hidden in its bosom.
But let there be a few uncivilized ones, at least, who shall regard the shafts and chimneys and hideous coal-heaps as marks of desecration and disease. Wealth and civilization, you say; aye, wealth and civilization for the owners of the mines, for the lordly "coal operators," whose summer palaces are set on the shoulders of the noble hills. But for the thousands of workers in the bowels of the earth; for those whose minds and souls, as well as bodies, are darkened with the coal-grim; for their wives and little children, existing that a race of subject-workers may be perpetuated, what portion of our wealth and civilization belongs to these? Does civilization necessarily mean the degradation and starvation intellectually and spiritually of ten, for the luxury and over-development of one?
Civilization impinges on humanity in Pennsylvania perhaps not more unfairly or cruelly than elsewhere; but the contrasts are shockingly apparent.
But we came to look at the hills and the river, not at the social relativities. And the hills are as sadly marked as the human moles who burrow into them. There is no desecration of a mountain so blighting as the sinking of a mine into its
