for want of it. The working people who were _not_ colliers, will long
remember that period as the time of the _coal famine_. While it lasted,
Lord Elcho went over to Tranent--a village in East Lothian--to address
the colliers upon their thriftlessness, their idleness, and their
attempted combinations to keep up the price of coal.

He had the moral courage--a quality much wanted in these days--to tell
his constituents some hard but honest truths. He argued with them about
the coal famine, and their desire to prolong it. They were working three
days a week, and idling the other days. Some of them did not do a stroke
of work during a week or a fortnight; others were taking about a hundred
Bank holidays yearly. But what were they doing with the money they
earned? Were they saving it for a rainy day; or, when the "roaring
times" no longer existed, were they preparing to fall back upon the
poor-rates? He found that in one case a man, with his two sons, was
earning seven pounds in a fortnight. "I should like," he said, "to see
those Scotchmen who are in the mining business taking advantage of these
happy times, and endeavouring by their industry to rise from their
present position--to exercise self-help, to acquire property, and
possibly to become coal masters themselves."

It had been said in a newspaper, that a miner was earning wages equal to
that of a Captain, and that a mining boy was earning wages equal to that
of a Lieutenant in Her Majesty's service. "I only know," said Lord
Elcho, "that I have a boy who, when he first joined Her Majesty's
service, was an Ensign, and that his wage--to earn which, remember, he
had, under the purchase system, to pay five hundred pounds,--was not the
wage you are now receiving, but the wage which you were receiving in bad
times,--and that was only five shillings a day." It might be said that
the collier risks his life in earning his wages; but so does the