Speaking of the great coal strike which occurred while he was
President, he developed the idea in this way:

"The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies, which
employed their tens of thousands, could easily dispense with the
services of any particular miner. The miner, on the other hand,
however expert, could not dispense with the companies. He needed
a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get one.
What the miner had to sell--his labor--was a perishable
commodity; the labor of today--if not sold today was lost
forever. Moreover, his labor was not like most commodities--a
mere thing; it was a part of a living, human being. The workman
saw, and all citizens who gave earnest thought to the matter saw
that the labor problem was not only an economic, but also a
moral, a human problem. Individually the miners were impotent
when they sought to enter a wage contract with the great
companies; they could make fair terms only by uniting into trade
unions to bargain collectively. The men were forced to cooperate
to secure not only their economic, but their simple human rights.
They, like other workmen, were compelled by the very conditions
under which they lived to unite in unions of their industry or
trade, and those unions were bound to grow in size, in strength,
and in power for good and evil as the industries in which the men
were employed grew larger and larger."*

* Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 471-78.

He was fond of quoting three statements of Lincoln's as
expressing precisely what he himself believed about capital and