PRICE OF COAL.
[To THE EDITOR 05 THE "srsorsroa.1 an article in your last number you charge the owners of coal mines with wilfully restricting the produce of their mines in -order to enhance the price of the coal. You say, " They will not introduce machine-cutting or increase the out-turn in any way till they cannot help themselves." It would, I believe, be hard for you to show any ground for such an assertion. With the great profits that the coalowners are now making, it is absurd to suppose that they will not press forward every ton they can mind to market. It is notorious that the coalowners in South Wales have been making the greatest efforts to introduce the double sdiSA, which would have the effect (as soon as a sufli- alenoy of colliers could be found) of doubling the produce, and avowedly on that very account the attempt has been resisted by the colliers. In the same paper in which you make the charge, a working collier bears testimony to its injustice. He says :— "And as regards the managers not caring to increase the out-put of coal, at the pit where I work the manager has kept some extra bands on purpose to take the places of those men stopping at home from work ; and more than this, he has discharged men for not. attending to their work five days a week, and, moreover, he has- kept some men working at night to increase the out-put ; bat• the public, if they were better acquainted with the miner and his manager, would not be very ready to accept all the- stories told of them by the Press." The same might be said on behalf of the South Wales managers, and probably of those itt every other district. The difficulties in the way of introducing coal-cutting machinery, and the doubts as to the profitable- working of it, are so great, as to make it quite unnecessary to suppose a sinister motive for not at once bringing it into use. For the rest, coalowners, like tradesmen of all kinds, professional people, artists, landowners, and everybody else, will take as much, for their services as they can get. It is the competition of those who require the goods that really fixes the price.—I am, Sir, &c., A COALOWNER.
[We attributed no sinister motives. It is not the interest of the owners to exhaust their mines by large out-turn at low price,. and we assumed that they acted on their intereat.—ED. Spectator.)
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