Thus slowly the consciousness of kind worked through the public to the miners, under the influence of such understanding as mining catastrophies shocked into the public mind. But the main force that made for the improvement of their conditions of work, for the development of standards of living among them and of orderly processes of government within the industry as a whole was the operation of the consciousness of kind within their own group.
The processes of civilization like all cosmic processes are slow. The period of recorded history is but a minute in the unnumbered years of man's life upon earth. It was by slow stages that the blind herd instinct which sends wolves hunting in packs and leads birds to migrate in flocks merged into the consciousness of kind and the spirit of service among men. So in the coal industry, the miners organized slowly, first in local groups, then by districts, then on a national scale with the beginnings of international affiliations. They drew together into unions, broke apart, drew together again. As they acquired strength, their interests came into conflict with the interests of the coal owners. There were strikes and lockouts, local joint agreements, then strikes and lockouts again, then other agreements for arbitration and conciliation, then more strikes and lockouts. That process still goes on as in the bitter civil war in West Virginia. But in the main it reached a culmination so far as the coal industry is concerned when in 1902 President Roosevelt intervened in the interests of the consumers, asserted a balance of power between and over the two groups, and established the foundations of orderly government within the industry. The processes by which representative government has grown up within the industry run closely parallel with the processes by which the parliamentary government arose in the European political states, with property owners performing the very important function of technical organization and development which in the early stages of national life the monarch and his executives performed, and the miners playing the rôle of the commoners. It is upon this historical structure that the future of the industry as a public service depends.