to stabilize revenues for the Reading and to do so by introducing his own manipulations of anthracite prices. So in the next mining season, when workers and operators entered into fresh disputes over the 1870 contract, he organized a loose (for the time being) combination of anthracite haulers that uniformly hiked freight rates to prohibitive levels, thereby cutting mine operators' revenues so ultimately to force the miners into accepting wages that the combination wanted. Feelings ran so high against this, that Gowen found himself having to mount a vigorous self-defense before state legislators against what was deemed unprecedented assumption of power by a corporation. Gowen, both testifying and cross-examining other witnesses, defended himself by taking the offensive. He attacked the WBA generally, and its leader, John Siney, personally, as ignorant, demagogic, wrong-headed in their misunderstandings of the laws of supply and demand; as preventing men from working, forcing the poor to pay high prices for coal, and ruining the iron industry. It was in these same hearings that Gowen first began to formulate in public discourse his theory that the miners' union had at its core a murderous criminal association: This organization first came into full fledged existence, in all the [coal] regions, in 1869. They then formed the Workingmen's Benevolent association, extending throughout the entire coal fields of Pennsylvania. I do not charge this Workingmen's Benevolent association with it, but I say there is an association which votes in secret, at night, that men's lives shall be taken, and that they shall be shot before their wives, murdered in cold blood, for daring to work against the order.... I do not blame this association, but I blame another association for doing it; and it happens that the only men who are shot are the men who dare to disobey the mandates of the Workingmen's Benevolent association. This idea, already formed in his mind well before any pointed investigation of such a spectral secret society, Gowen was to expand and propound later in the decade into the image of an international conspiracy as the ultimate target behind the prosecution of coal-region Mollie Maguires. Controlling production: the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company Unlike later-formed anthracite-hauling railroads tied to other portions of the coal region, such as the Lehigh Valley and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, whose corporate charters allowed them to also be involved in mining operations, the Philadelphia