322 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS take a position that was considered ill-advised by many min- ers and labor men. He had refused to allow the miners in the soft coal field to violate their contract with the soft coal mine owners, and strike in sympathy with the anthracite miners. Mitchell insisted that a contract was sacred and to break the contract in force was to make it impossible to secure other contracts. He insisted that the end of organized labor was to secure the confidence of capital, and, to secure this, all con- tracts made in good faith must be adhered to. This position was the natural result of his theory that there was no cause for antagonism between labor and capital; that the mutual recognition of the necessity of peace was the ultimate end to be sought. This view was not and is not held by many labor leaders. One has only to glance at the statements of Tom Mann, one of the great English labor leaders to note this. Mann de- clares that, ** every provision for peace between the two par- ties is a perpetual wrong to labor. *' Another labor leader says: **We do not recognize the capitalist's right to live any more than we recognize the right of the typhoid bacilli to thrive at the expense of the patient, the patient being able merely to keep alive." As the result of movements of which the above quotations are illustrative, John Mitchell has found his work in the last few years not so much a matter of directing battles against employers as an attempt to form and direct the thought of the public and the laborers upon questions of labor economics. In addition to his book on Organized Labor he has contrib- uted to magazines a number of articles having to do with labor conditions and labor laws the world over. Relieved of the presidency of the United Mine Workers of America in 1908, he has remained vice president of the American Federation of Labor. Time and again in the conventions of this organ- ization he has stood firmly against the attempts to capture the organization for socialists or for more radical labor or- ganizations. He still believes that the principle of the labor union is right. He still insists that all the laboring man needs or should desire is the right of collective bargaining.
