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with the revival of industry they would get orders for coal.

When it come time to meet again in two or three weeks, as we had agreed, Ickes had had his economists and his Bureau of Mines working on it, and I had had my economists on it. We had a number of other people in on it. Everybody agreed it was a crazy idea. In the first place, to try to fix a fair price for the mines would be an almost insuparable task and certainly couldn't be done in this emergency situation. Anyhow, we didn't know how to run coal mines. The Bureau of Mines didn't know how to run coal mines. Their business had been to kind of make estimates of the natural resources that existed in the United States in coal and to take the lead in provisions against accidents and safety codes for mines. That had been the principal duty of the Bureau of Mines. They didn't know how to run a mine at all. The only people who know how to run mines are men who've done it and have grown up in the trade. The accident hazard would be perfectly preposterous for the government to take over without any preliminaries.

At any rate, we all agreed that it couldn't be done and that they must take the penalty. If they went broke, all right, they went broke, but in a capitalist society when a company goes broke, it goes broke. The stockholders don't get any money, the managers don't get any money, and