According to Whitaker’s Almanac, there are something under a million of them actually at work, which means probably that the whole race numbers something over two millions. And, speaking broadly, no one knows anything about them. The most modern parents, anxious to be parental in a scientific manner, will explain to their children on the hearth the chemistry of the fire, showing how the coal releases again the carbon which was absorbed by the plant in a past age, and so on, to the end that the children may learn to understand the order of the universe.

This I have seen. But I have never seen parents explaining to their children on the hearth the effect of coal-getting on the family life of the collier, to the end that the children might learn to understand the price of coal in sweat, blood, and tears. The householder is interested only in the other insignificant part of the price of coal. And this is odd, for the majority of householders are certainly not monsters of selfish and miserly indifference to the human factor in economics. Nor—I have convinced myself, though with difficulty—are the members of the House of Lords. Yet among all the speeches against the Miners’ Eight Hours Bill in this Chamber where beats the warm, generous heart of Lord Halsbury, I do not remember one which mentioned the real price of coal. Even the members of the sublime Coal Consumers’ League, though phantoms, cannot be phantoms without bowels. But has the League ever issued one leaflet dealing with the psychology of the collier’s wife as affected by notions of fire-damp? I doubt it.

Even artists have remained unstirred by the provocative mystery of this subterranean race, which perspires with a pick, not only beneath our cellars, but far beneath the caves of the sea itself. A working miner, Joseph Skipsey, had to write the one verse about this race which has had vigour enough to struggle into the anthologies. The only novel handling in the grand manner this tremendous and bizarre theme is Emile Zola’s “Germinal.” And, though it is a fine novel, though it is honest and really impressive, there are shallows in the mighty stream of its narrative, and its climax is marred by a false sentimentality, which is none the less sentimentality for being sensual. Not a great novel, but nearly great; as the child’s ring was “nearly gold.” And in English fiction what is there but “Miss Grace of All Souls,” a wistful and painstaking book, with pages which extort respect, but which no power can save from oblivion? And in the fine arts, is there anything but pretty coloured sentimentalities of hopeless dawns at pit-heads? Well, there is! Happily there are Constantin Meunier’s sculptures of miners at work—compositions over which oblivion will have no power. But I think this is all.

Journalistic reporting of great tragic events is certainly much better than it used to be, when the phraseology of the reporter was as rigidly fixed by convention as poetic phraseology in the eighteenth century. The special correspondent is now much more of an artist, because he is much more free. But he is handicapped by the fact that when he does his special work really well, he is set to doing special work always, and lives largely among abnormal and affrighting phenomena, and so his sensibility is dulled. Moreover, there are valuable effects and impressions which the greatest genius on earth could not accomplish in a telegraph office. But did you ever see the lives or the swift deaths of the mysterious people treated, descriptively by an imaginative writer in a monthly review? I noted recently with pleasure that the American magazines, characteristically alert, have awakened to the possibilities of the mysterious people as material for serious work in the more leisurely journalism. The last tremendous accident in the United States produced at any rate one careful and fairly adequate study of the psychology of the principal figures in it, and of the drama which a bundle of burning hay originated.

Even if I did not share the general incurious apathy towards the mysterious people, I should not blame that apathy, for it is so widespread that there must be some human explanation of it; my object is merely to point it out. But I share it. I lived half my life among coalpits. I never got up in the morning without seeing the double wheels at a neighbouring pit-head spin silently in opposite directions for a time, and then stop, and then begin again. I was accustomed to see coal and ironstone, not in tons, but in thousands of tons. I have been close to colliery disasters so enormous that the ambitious local paper would make special reporters of the whole of its staff, and give up to the affair the whole of its space, save a corner for the betting news. My district lives half by earthenware and half by mining. I have often philandered with pot-workers, but I have never felt a genuine, active curiosity about the mysterious people. I have never been down a coalpit, though the galleries are now white-washed and lighted by electricity. It has never occurred to me to try to write a novel about the real price of coal.

And yet how powerfully suggestive the glimpses I have had! Down there, on my heath, covered with a shuttle-work of trams, you may get on to a car about four o’clock in the afternoon to pay a visit, and you may observe a handful of silent, formidable men in the car, a greyish-yellowish-black from head to foot. Like Eugene Stratton, they are black everywhere, except the whites of their eyes. You ask yourself what these begrimed creatures that touch nothing without soiling it are doing abroad at four o’clock in the afternoon, seeing that men are not usually unyoked till six.

They have an uncanny air, especially when you reflect that there is not one arm among them that could not stretch you out with one blow. Then you remember that they have been buried in geological strata probably since five o’clock that morning, and that the sky must look strange to them.

Or you may be walking in the appalling outskirts, miles from town halls and free libraries, but miles also from flowers, and you may see a whole procession of these silent men, encrusted with carbon and perspiration, a perfect pilgrimage of them, winding its way over a down where the sparse grass is sooty and the trees are withered. And then you feel that you yourself are the exotic stranger in those regions. But the procession absolutely ignores you. You might not exist. It goes on, absorbed, ruthless, and sinister. Your feeling is that if you got in its path it would tramp right over you. And it passes out of sight.

Around, dotting the moors, are the mining villages, withdrawn, self-centred, where the entire existence of the community is regulated by a single steam-siren, where good fortune and ill-fortune are common, and where the disaster of one is the disaster of all. Little is known of the life of these villages and townlets—known, that is, by people capable of imaginative external sympathetic comprehension. And herein is probably a reason why the mysterious people remain so mysterious. They live physically separated. A large proportion of them never mingle with the general mass. They are not sufficiently seen of surface-men to maintain curiosity concerning them. They keep themselves to themselves, and circumstances so keep them. Only at elections do they seem to impinge in powerful silence on the destinies of the nation.

I have visited some of these villages. I have walked over the moors to them with local preachers, and heard them challenge God. I have talked to doctors and magistrates about them, and acquired the certainty, vague and yet vivid, that in religion, love, work, and debauch they are equally violent and splendid. It needs no insight to perceive that they live nearer even than sailors to that central tract of emotion where life and death meet. But I have never sympathetically got near them. And I don’t think I ever shall.

Once I was talking to a man whose father, not himself a miner, had been the moral chieftain of one of these large villages, the individuality to which everyone turned in doubt or need. And I was getting this man to untap the memories of his childhood. “Eh!” he said, “I remember how th’ women used to come to my mother sometimes of a night, and beg, ‘Mrs. B., an’ ye got any old white shirts to spare? They’re bringing ’em up, and we mun lay ’em out!’ And I remember—” But just then he had to leave me, and I obtained no more. But what a glimpse!