of production and the expenditure of the minimum of human effort. It is
the acme of inventive genius. To work the breakers, a man need have no
more intelligence than the tow-mule that plods a beaten path; and such a
man is the ideal laborer from the standpoint of the owners of the
breakers.

But such men are not indigenous to America; they must be imported, and
that, too, from the most benighted lands of Europe.

What an incubator of warped humanity the breaker has become! It saps
even the attenuated manhood of the aliens it attracts, and when they are
rendered useless for its ends, emits them to be a scourge on the earth.

But the breakers are the monument of the civilization of the Nineteenth
Century, which esteems commercial as superior to mental advancement.

As the drama to be unfolded will be enacted largely in this spot, which
nature fashioned on its fairest pattern, and which man has seared with
his cruel tool, a description of the town of Wilkes-Barre and its
environs is essential. The town is the creation of the Mines. Coal
abounds in the valley of the Susquehanna, and from the first impetus
given the coal industry by the establishment of railroads, the mines at
this place have been worked without intermission. The population of the
town has been increasing steadily for the past thirty years, until
to-day it reaches the proportions of a populous city. There is little
variety in the citizens; but the contrast they present makes up for this
deficiency. Broadly speaking there are but two classes, the magnates and
their mercenaries. The former live in the mansions on the esplanade and
constitute the governing minority. The coal miners and the workers on
the breakers, who eke out their lives in slavery, and who sleep in