Even in Germany, where Labriola considers the socialists to be more or less free from the taint of State capitalism, they have from the very beginning voted for State ownership. As early as 1870 the German socialists, upon a resolution presented by Bebel, adopted by a large majority the proposition that the State should retain in its hands the State lands, Church lands, communal lands, the mines, and the railroads.[AD] When adopting the new party program at Erfurt in 1891, the Congress struck out the section directed against State socialism and adopted a number of propositions leading to that end. Again, at Breslau in 1895, the Germans adopted several State-socialist measures. "At this time," says Paul Kampffmeyer, "a proposition of the agrarian commission on the party program, which had a decided State-socialist stamp, was discussed. It contained, among other things, the retaining and the increase of the public land domain; the management of the State and community lands on their own account; the giving of State credit to cooeperative societies; the socialization of mortgages, debts, and loans on land; the socialization of chattel and real estate insurance, etc. Bebel agreed to all these State-socialist propositions. He recalled the fact, that the nationalizing of the railroads had been accomplished with the agreement of the social-democracy."[21] "That which applies to the railways applies also to the forestry," said Bebel. "Have we any objections to the enlarging of the State forests and thereby the employment of workers and officials? The same thing applies to the mines, the salt industry, road-making, the post office, and the telegraphs. In all of these industries we have hundreds of thousands of dependent people, and yet we do not want to advocate their abolition but rather their extension. In this direction we must break with all our prejudices. We ought only to oppose State industry where it is antagonistic to culture and where it restricts development, as, for instance, is the case in military matters. Indeed, we must even compel the State constantly to take over means of culture, because by that means we will finally put the present State out of joint. And, lastly, even the strongest State power fails in that degree in which the State drives its own officers and workers into opposition to itself, as has occurred in the case of the postal service. The attitude which would refuse to strengthen the power of the State, because this would entrust to it the solution of the problems of culture, smacks of the Manchester school. We must strip off these Manchesterian egg-shells."[22]

Wilhelm Liebknecht also dealt with those who opposed the strengthening of the class State. "We are concerned," he said, " ... first of all about the strengthening of the State power. In all similar cases we have decided in favor of practical activity. We allowed funds for the Northeast Sea Canal; we voted for the labor legislation, although the proposed laws did decidedly extend the State power. We are in favor of the State railways, although we have thereby brought about ... the dependence of numerous livings upon the State."[23] As early, indeed, as 1881 Liebknecht saw that the present State was preparing the way for socialism. Speaking of the compulsory insurance laws proposed by Bismarck, he refers to such legislation as embodying "in a decisive manner the principle of State regulation of production as opposed to the laissez-faire system of the Manchester school. The right of the State to regulate production supposes the duty of the State to interest itself in labor, and State control of the labor of society leads directly to State organization of the labor of society."[24] Further even than this goes Karl Kautsky, who has been called the "acutest observer and thinker of modern socialism." "Among the social organizations in existence to-day," he says, "there is but one that possesses the requisite dimensions, and may be used as the framework for the establishment and development of the socialist commonwealth, and that is the modern State."[25]

Without going needlessly far into this subject, it seems safe to conclude that the State is no more terrifying to the modern socialist than it was to Marx and Engels. There is not a socialist party in any country that has not used its power to force the State to undertake collective enterprise. Indeed, all the immediate programs of the various socialist parties advocate the strengthening of the economic power of the State. They are adding more and more to its functions; they are broadening its scope; and they are, without question, vastly increasing its power. But, at the same time, they are democratizing the State. By direct legislation, by a variety of political reforms, and by the power of the great socialist parties themselves, they are really wresting the control of the State from the hands of special privilege. Furthermore—and this is something neither the anarchists nor the syndicalists will see—State socialism is in itself undermining and slowly destroying the class character of the State. According to the view of Marx, the State is to-day "but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole capitalist class."[26] And it is this because the economic power of the capitalist class is supreme. But by the growth of State socialism the economic power of the private capitalists is steadily weakened. The railroads, the mines, the forests, and other great monopolies are taken out of their hands, and, to the extent that this happens, their control over the State itself disappears. Their only power to control the State is their economic power, and, if that were entirely to disappear, the class character of the State would disappear also. "The State is not abolished. It dies out"; to repeat Engels' notable words. "As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, ... nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary."[27]

The syndicalists are, of course, quite right when they say that State socialism is an attempt to allay popular discontent, but they are quite wrong when they accept this as proof that it must inevitably sidetrack socialism. They overlook the fact that it is always a concession granted grudgingly to the growing power of democracy. It is a point yielded in order to prevent if possible the necessity of making further concessions. Yet history shows that each concession necessitates another, and that State socialism is growing with great rapidity in all countries where the workers have developed powerful political organizations. Even now both friends and opponents see in the growth of State socialism the gradual formation of that transitional stage that leads from capitalism to socialism. The syndicalist and anarchist alone fail to see here any drift toward socialism; they see only a growing tyranny creating a class of favored civil servants, who are divorced from the actual working class. At the same time, they point out that the condition of the toilers for the State has not improved, and that they are exploited as mercilessly by the State as they were formerly exploited by the capitalist. To dispute this would be time ill spent. If it be indeed true, it defeats the argument of the syndicalist. If the State in its capitalism outrageously exploits its servants, tries to prevent them from organizing, and penalizes them for striking, it will only add to the intensity of the working-class revolt. It will aid more and more toward creating a common understanding between the workers for the State and the workers for the private capitalist. In any case, it will accelerate the tendency toward the democratization of the State and, therefore, toward socialism.

As an alternative to this actual evolution toward socialism, the syndicalists propose to force society to put the means of production into the hands of the trade unions. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Owen, Proudhon, Blanc, Lassalle, and Bakounin all advocated what may be called "group socialism."[28] This conception of future society contemplates the ownership of the mines by the miners, of the railroads by the railway workers, of the land by the peasants. All the workers in the various industries are to be organized into unions and then brought together in a federation. Several objections are made to this outline of a new society. In the first place, it is artificial. Except for an occasional cooeperative undertaking, there is not, nor has there ever been, any tendency toward trade-union ownership of industry. In addition, it is an idea that is to-day an anachronism. It is conceivable that small federated groups might control and conduct countless little industries, but it is not conceivable that groups of "self-governing," "autonomous," and "independent" workmen could, or would, be allowed by a highly industrialized society to direct and manage such vast enterprises as the trusts have built up. If each group is to run industry as it pleases, the Standard Oil workers or the steel workers might menace society in the future as the owners of those monopolies menace it in the present. There is no indication in the literature of the syndicalists, and certainly no promise in a system of completely autonomous groups of producers, of any solution of the vast problems of modern trustified industry. It may be that such ideas corresponded to the state of things represented in early capitalism. But the socialist ideas of the present are the product of a more advanced state of capitalism than Owen, Proudhon, Lassalle, and Bakounin knew, or than the syndicalists of France, Italy, and Spain have yet been forced seriously to deal with. Indeed, it was necessary for Marx to forecast half a century of capitalist development in order to clarify the program of socialism and to emphasize the necessity for that program.

It is a noteworthy and rather startling fact that Sidney and Beatrice Webb had pointed out the economic fallacies of syndicalism before the French Confederation of Labor was founded or Sorel, Berth, and Lagardelle had written a line on the subject. In their "History of Trade Unionism" they tell most interestingly the story of Owen's early trade-union socialism. The book was published in 1894, two or three years before the theories of the French school were born. Nevertheless, their critique of Owenism expresses as succinctly and forcibly as anything yet written the attitude of the socialists toward the economics of modern syndicalism. "Of all Owen's attempts to reduce his socialism to practice," write the Webbs, "this was certainly the very worst. For his short-lived communities there was at least this excuse: that within their own area they were to be perfectly homogeneous little socialist States. There were to be no conflicting sections, and profit-making and competition were to be effectually eliminated. But in 'the Trades Union,' as he conceived it, the mere combination of all the workmen in a trade as cooeperative producers no more abolished commercial competition than a combination of all the employers in it as a joint stock company. In effect, his Grand Lodges would have been simply the head offices of huge joint stock companies owning the entire means of production in their industry, and subject to no control by the community as a whole. They would, therefore, have been in a position at any moment to close their ranks and admit fresh generations of workers only as employees at competitive wages instead of as shareholders, thus creating at one stroke a new capitalist class and a new proletariat.[29] ... In short, the socialism of Owen led him to propose a practical scheme which was not even socialistic, and which, if it could possibly have been carried out, would have simply arbitrarily redistributed the capital of the country without altering or superseding the capitalist system in the least."[30]

Although this "group socialism" would certainly necessitate a Parliament in order to harmonize the conflicting interests of the various productive associations, there is nothing, it appears, that the syndicalist so much abhors. He is never quite done with picturing the burlesque of parliamentarism. While, no doubt, this is a necessary corollary to his antagonism to the State, it is aggravated by the fact that one of the chief ends of a political party is to put its representatives into Parliament. The syndicalist, in ridiculing all parliamentary activity, is at the same time, therefore, endeavoring to prove the folly of political action. That you cannot bring into the world a new social order by merely passing laws is something the syndicalist never wearies of pointing out. Parliamentarism, he likes to repeat, is a new superstition that is weakening the activity and paralyzing the mentality of the working class. "The superstitious belief in parliamentary action," Leone says, " ... ascribes to acts of Parliament the magic power of bringing about new social forces."[31] Sorel refers to the same thing as the "belief in the magic influence of departmental authority,"[32] while Labriola divines that "parties may elect members of Parliament, but they cannot set one machine going, nor can they organize one business undertaking."[33] All this reminds one of what Marx himself said in the early fifties. He speaks in "Revolution and Counter-Revolution," a collection of some articles that were originally written for the New York Tribune, of "parliamentary cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honor to count them among its members, and that all and everything going on outside the walls of their house—wars, revolutions, railway constructing, colonizing of whole new continents, California gold discoveries, Central American canals, Russian armies, and whatever else may have some little claim to influence upon the destinies of mankind—is nothing compared with the incommensurable events hinging upon the important question, whatever it may be, just at that moment occupying the attention of their honorable house."[34]

No one can read this statement of Marx's without realizing its essential truthfulness. But it should not be forgotten that Marx himself believed, and every prominent socialist believes, that the control of the parliaments of the world is essential to any movement that seeks to transform the world. The powerlessness of parliaments may be easily exaggerated. To say that they are incapable of constructive work is to deny innumerable facts of history. Laws have both set up and destroyed industries. The action of parliaments has established gigantic industries. The schools, the roads, the Panama Canal, and a thousand other great operations known to us to-day have been set going by parliaments. Tariff laws make and destroy industries. Prohibition laws have annihilated industries, while legality, which is the peculiar product of parliaments, has everything to do with the ownership of property, of industry, and of the management of capital. For one who is attacking a legal status, who is endeavoring to alter political, juridical, as well as industrial and social relations, the conquering of parliaments is vitally necessary. The socialist recognizes that the parliaments of to-day represent class interests, that, indeed, they are dominated by class interests, and, as such, that they do not seek to change but to conserve what now exists. As a result, there is a parliamentary cretinism, because, in a sense, the dominant elements in Parliament are only managing the affairs of powerful influences outside of Parliament. They are not the guiding hand, but the servile hand, of capitalism.

For the above reason, chiefly, the syndicalists are on safe ground when they declare that parliaments are corrupt. Corruption is a product of the struggle of the classes. To obtain special privilege, class laws, and immunity from punishment, the "big interests" bribe and corrupt parliaments. However, corruption does not stop there. The trade unions themselves suffer. Labor leaders are bought just as labor representatives are bought. Insurrection itself is often controlled and rendered abortive by corruption. Numberless violent uprisings have been betrayed by those who fomented them. The words of Fruneau at Basel in 1869 are memorable. "Bakounin has declared," he said, "that it is necessary to await the Revolution. Ah, well, the Revolution! Away with it! Not that I fear the barricades, but, when one is a Frenchman and has seen the blood of the bravest of the French running in the streets in order to elevate to power the ambitious who, a few months later, sent us to Cayenne, one suspects the same snares, because the Revolution, in view of the ignorance of the proletarians, would take place only at the profit of our adversaries."[35] There is no way to escape the corrupting power of capitalism. It has its representatives in every movement that promises to be hostile. It has its spies in the labor unions, its agents provocateurs in insurrections; and its money can always find hands to accept it. One does not escape corruption by abandoning Parliament. And Bordat, the anarchist, was the slave of a mania when he declared: "To send workingmen to a parliament is to act like a mother who would take her daughter to a brothel."[36] Parliaments are perhaps more corrupt than trade unions, but that is simply because they have greater power. To no small degree bribery and campaign funds are the tribute that capitalism pays to the power of the State.

The consistent opposition of the syndicalists to the State is leading them desperately far, and we see them developing, as the anarchists did before them, a contempt even for democracy. The literature of syndicalism teems with attacks on democracy. "Syndicalism and Democracy," says Emile Pouget, "are the two opposite poles, which exclude and neutralize each other.... Democracy is a social superfluity, a parasitic and external excrescence, while syndicalism is the logical manifestation of a growth of life, it is a rational cohesion of human beings, and that is why, instead of restraining their individuality, it prolongs and develops it."[37] Democracy is, in the view of Sorel, the regime par excellence, in which men are governed "by the magical power of high-sounding words rather than by ideas; by formulas rather than by reasons; by dogmas, the origin of which nobody cares to find out, rather than by doctrines based on observation."[38] Lagardelle declares that syndicalism is post-democratic. "Democracy corresponds to a definite historical movement," he says, "which has come to an end. Syndicalism is an anti-democratic movement."[39] These are but three out of a number of criticisms of democracy that might be quoted. Although natural enough as a consequence of syndicalist antagonism to the State, these ideas are nevertheless fatal when applied to the actual conduct of a working-class movement. It means that the minority believes that it can drive the majority. We remember that Guerard suggested, in his advocacy of the general strike, that, if the railroad workers struck, many other trades "would be compelled to quit work." "A daring revolutionary minority conscious of its aim can carry away with it the majority."[40] Pouget confesses: "The syndicalist has a contempt for the vulgar idea of democracy—the inert, unconscious mass is not to be taken into account when the minority wishes to act so as to benefit it...."[41] He refers in another place to the majority, who "may be considered as human zeros. Thus appears the enormous difference in method," concludes Pouget, "which distinguishes syndicalism and democracy: the latter, by the mechanism of universal suffrage, gives direction to the unconscious ... and stifles the minorities who bear within them the hopes of the future."[42]

This is anarchism all over again, from Proudhon to Goldman.[43] But, while the Bakouninists were forced, as a result of these views, to abandon organized effort, the newest anarchists have attempted to incorporate these ideas into the very constitution of the French Confederation of Labor. And at present they are, in fact, a little clique that rides on the backs of the organized workers, and the majority cannot throw them off so long as a score of members have the same voting power in the Confederation as that of a trade union with ten thousand members. All this must, of course, have very serious consequences. Opposition to majority rule has always been a cardinal principle of the anarchists. It is also a fundamental principle of every American political machine. To defeat democracy is obviously the chief purpose of a Tammany Hall. But, when this idea is actually advocated as an ideal of working-class organization, when it is made to stand as a policy and practice of a trade union, it can only result in suspicion, disruption, and, eventually, in complete ruin. It appears that the militant syndicalist, like the anarchist, realizes that he cannot expect the aid of the people. He turns, then, to the minority, the fighting inner circle, as the sole hope.

It is inevitable, therefore, that syndicalism and socialism should stand at opposite poles. They are exactly as far apart as anarchism and socialism. And, if we turn to the question of methods, we find an antagonism almost equally great. How are the workers to obtain possession of industry? On this point, as well as upon their conception of socialism, the syndicalists are not advanced beyond Owenism. "One question, and that the most immediately important of all," say the Webbs, speaking of Owen's projects, "was never seriously faced: How was the transfer of the industries from the capitalists to the unions to be effected in the teeth of a hostile and well-armed government? The answer must have been that the overwhelming numbers of 'the trades union' would render conflict impossible. At all events, Owen, like the early Christians, habitually spoke as if the day of judgment of the existing order of society was at hand. The next six months, in his view, were always going to see the 'new moral world' really established. The change from the capitalist system to a complete organization of industry under voluntary associations of producers was to 'come suddenly upon society like a thief in the night.'... It is impossible not to regret that the first introduction of the English Trade Unionist to Socialism should have been effected by a foredoomed scheme which violated every economic principle of collectivism, and left the indispensable political preliminaries to pure chance."[44] Little need be added to what the Webbs have said on the utopian features of syndicalism or even upon the haphazard method adopted to achieve them. "No politics in the unions" follows logically enough from an avowed antagonism to the State. If one starts with the assumption that nothing can be done through the State—as Owen, Bakounin, and the syndicalists have done—one is, of course, led irretrievably to oppose parliamentary and other political methods of action.

When the syndicalists throw over democracy and foreswear political action, they are fatally driven to the point where they must abandon the working class. In the meantime, they are sadly misleading it. It is when we touch this phase of the syndicalist movement that we begin to discover real bitterness. Here direct action stands in opposition to political action. The workers must choose the one method or the other. The old clash appears again in all its tempestuous hate. Jules Guesde was early one of the adherents of Bakounin, but in all his later life he has been pitiless in his warfare on the anarchists. As soon, therefore, as the direct-actionists began again to exercise an influence, Guesde entered the field of battle. I happened to be at Limoges in 1906 to hear Guesde speak these memorable words at the French Socialist Congress: "Political action is necessarily revolutionary. It does not address itself to the employer, but to the State, while industrial action addresses itself to the individual employer or to associations of employers. Industrial action does not attack the employer as an institution, because the employer is the effect, the result of capitalist property. As soon as capitalist property will have disappeared, the employer will disappear, and not before. It is in the socialist party—because it is a political party—that one fights against the employer class, and that is why the socialist party is truly an economic party, tending to transform social and political economy. At the present moment words have their importance. And I should like to urge the comrades strongly never to allow it to be believed that trade-union action is economic action. No; this latter action is taken only by the political organization of the working class. It is the party of the working class which leads it—that is to say, the socialist party—because property is a social institution which cannot be transformed except by the exploited class making use of political power for this purpose....

"I realize," he continued, "that the direct-actionists attempt to identify political action with parliamentary action. No; electoral action as well as parliamentary action may be forms; pieces of political action. They are not political action as a whole, which is the effort to seize public powers—the Government. Political action is the people of Paris taking possession of the Hotel de Ville in 1871. It is the Parisian workers marching upon the National Assembly in 1848.... To those who go about claiming that political action, as extolled by the party, reduces itself to the production of public officials, you will oppose a flat denial. Political action is, moreover, not the production of laws. It is the grasping by the working class of the manufactory of laws; it is the political expropriation of the employer class, which alone permits its economic expropriation.... I wish that someone would explain to me how the breaking of street lights, the disemboweling of soldiers, the burning of factories, can constitute a means of transforming the ownership of property.... Supposing that the strikers were masters of the streets and should seize the factories, would not the factories still remain private property? Instead of being the property of a few employers or stockholders, they would become the property of the 500 or the 5,000 workingmen who had taken them, and that is all. The owners of the property will have changed; the system of ownership will have remained the same. And ought we not to consider it necessary to say that to the workers over and over again? Ought we to allow them to take a path that leads nowhere?... No; the socialists could not, without crime, lend themselves to such trickery. It is our imperative duty to bring back the workers to reality, to remind them always that one can only be revolutionary if one attacks the government and the State."[45] "Trade-union action moves within the circle of capitalism without breaking through it, and that is necessarily reformist, in the good sense of the word. In order to ameliorate the conditions of the victims of capitalist society, it does not touch the system. All the revolutionary wrangling can avail nothing against this fact. Even when a strike is triumphant, the day after the strike the wage earners remain wage earners and capitalist exploitation continues. It is a necessity, a fatality, which trade-union action suffers."[46]

Any comment of mine would, I think, only serve to mar this masterly logic of Guesde's. There is nothing perhaps in socialist literature which so ably sustains the traditional position of the socialist movement. The battles in France over this question have been bitterly fought for over half a century. The most brilliant of minds have been engaged in the struggle. Proudhon, Bakounin, Briand, Sorel, Lagardelle, Berth, Herve, are men of undoubted ability. Opposed to them we find the Marxists, led in these latter years by Guesde and Jaures. And while direct action has always been vigorously supported in France both by the intellectuals and by the masses, it is the policy of Guesde and Jaures which has made headway. At the time when the general strike was looked upon as a revolutionary panacea, and the French working class seemed on the point of risking everything in one throw of the dice, Jaures uttered a solemn warning: "Toward this abyss ... the proletariat is feeling itself more and more drawn, at the risk not only of ruining itself should it fall over, but of dragging down with it for years to come either the wealth or the security of the national life."[47] "If the proletarians take possession of the mine and the factory, it will be a perfectly fictitious ownership. They will be embracing a corpse, for the mines and factories will be no better than dead bodies while economic circulation is suspended and production is stopped. So long as a class does not own and govern the whole social machine, it can seize a few factories and yards, if it wants to, but it really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hand a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of transportation."[48] "The working class would be the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession if it mistook what can be only the tactics of despair for a method of revolution."[49]

The struggle, therefore, between the syndicalists and the socialists is, as we see, the same clash over methods that occurred in the seventies and eighties between the anarchists and the socialists. In abandoning democracy, in denying the efficacy of political action, and in resorting to methods which can only end in self-destruction, the syndicalist becomes the logical descendant of the anarchist. He is at this moment undergoing an evolution which appears to be leading him into the same cul-de-sac that thwarted his forefather. His path is blocked by the futility of his own weapons. He is fatally driven, as Plechanoff said, either to serve the bourgeois politicians or to resort to the tactics of Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, and Most. The latter is the more likely, since the masses refuse to be drawn into the general strike as they formerly declined to participate in artificial uprisings.[AE] The daring conscious minority more and more despair, and they turn to the only other weapon in their arsenal, that of sabotage. There is a kind of fatality which overtakes the revolutionist who insists upon an immediate, universal, and violent revolution. He must first despair of the majority. He then loses confidence even in the enlightened minority. And, in the end, like the Bakouninist, he is driven to individual acts of despair. What will doubtless happen at no distant date in France and Italy will be a repetition of the congress at The Hague. When the trade-union movement actually develops into a powerful organization, it will be forced to throw off this incubus of the new anarchism. It is already thought that a majority of the French trade unionists oppose the anarchist tendencies of the clique in control, and certainly a number of the largest and most influential unions frankly class themselves as reformist syndicalists, in order to distinguish themselves from the revolutionary syndicalists. What will come of this division time only can tell.

In any case, it is becoming clear even to the French unionists that direct action is not and cannot be, as Guesde has pointed out, revolutionary action. It cannot transform our social system. It is destined to failure just as insurrection as a policy was destined to failure. Rittinghausen said at Basel in 1869: "Revolution, as a matter of fact, accomplishes nothing. If you are not able to formulate, after the revolution, by legislation, your legitimate demands, the revolution will perish miserably."[50] This was true in 1848, in 1871, and even in the great French Revolution itself. Nothing would have seemed easier at the time of the French Revolution than for the peasants to have directly possessed themselves of the land. They were using it. Their houses were planted in the midst of it. Their landlords in many cases had fled. Yet Kropotkin, in his story of "The Great French Revolution," relates that the redistribution of land awaited the action of Parliament. To be sure, some of the peasants had taken the land, but they were not at all sure that it might not again be taken from them by some superior force. Their rights were not defined, and there was such chaos in the entire situation that, in the end, the whole question had to be left to Parliament. It was only after the action of the Convention, June 11, 1793, that the rights of ownership were defined. It was only then, as Kropotkin says, that "everyone had a right to the land. It was a complete revolution."[51] That the greatest of living anarchists should be forced to pay this tribute to the action of Parliament is in itself an assurance. For masses in the time of revolution to grab whatever they desire is, after all, to constitute what Jaures calls a fictitious ownership. Some legality is needed to establish possession and a sense of security, and, up to the present, only the political institutions of society have been able to do that. For this precise reason every social struggle and class struggle of the past has been a political struggle.

There remains but one other fundamental question, which must be briefly examined. The syndicalists do not go back to Owen as the founder of their philosophy. They constantly reiterate the claim that they alone to-day are Marxists and that it is given to them to keep "pure and undefiled" the theories of that giant mind. They base their claim on the ground of Marx's economic interpretation of history and especially upon his oft-repeated doctrine that upon the economic structure of society rises the juridical and political superstructure. They maintain that the political institutions are merely the reflex of economic conditions. Alter the economic basis of society, and the political structure must adjust itself to the new conditions. As a result of this truly Marxian reasoning, they assert that the revolutionary movement must pursue solely economic aims and disregard totally the existing and, to their minds, superfluous political relations. They accuse the socialists of a contradiction. Claiming to be Marxists and basing their program upon the economic interpretation of history, the socialists waste their energies in trying to modify the results instead of obliterating the causes. Political institutions are parasitical. Why, therefore, ignore economic foundations and waste effort remodeling the parasitical superstructure? There is a contradiction here, but not on the part of the socialists. Proudhon was entirely consistent when he asked: "Can we not administer our goods, keep our accounts, arrange our differences, look after our common interests?"[52] And, moreover, he was consistent when he declared: "I want you to make the very institutions which I charge you to abolish, ... so that the new society shall appear as the spontaneous, natural, and necessary development of the old."[53] If that were once done the dissolution of government would follow, as he says, in a way about which one can at present make only guesses. But Proudhon urged his followers to establish cooeperative banks, cooeperative industries, and a variety of voluntary industrial enterprises, in order eventually to possess themselves of the means of production. If the working class, through its own cooeperative efforts, could once acquire the ownership of industry, if they could thus expropriate the present owners and gradually come into the ownership of all natural resources and all means of production—in a word, of all social capital—they would not need to bother themselves with the State. If, in possessing themselves thus of all economic power, they were also to neglect the State, its machinery would, of course, tumble into uselessness and eventually disappear. As the great capitalists to-day make laws through the stock exchange, through their chambers of commerce, through their pools and combinations, so the working class could do likewise if they were in possession of industry. But the working class to-day has no real economic power. It has no participation in the ownership of industry. It is claimed that it might withdraw its labor power and in this manner break down the entire economic system. It is urged that labor alone is absolutely necessary to production and that if, in a great general strike, it should cease production, the whole of society would be forced to capitulate. And in theory this seems unassailable, but actually it has no force whatever. In the first place, this economic power does not exist unless the workers are organized and are practically unanimous in their action. Furthermore, the economic position of the workers is one of utter helplessness at the time of a universal strike, in that they cannot feed themselves. As they are the nearest of all classes to starvation, they will be the first to suffer by a stoppage of work. There is still another vital weakness in this so-called economic theory. The battles that result from a general strike will not be on the industrial field. They will be battles between the armed agents of the State and unarmed masses of hungry men. Whatever economic power the workers are said to possess would, in that case, avail them little, for the results of their struggles would depend upon the military power which they would be able to manifest. The individual worker has no economic power, nor has the minority, and it may even be questioned if the withdrawal of all the organized workers could bring society to its knees. Multitudes of the small propertied classes, of farmers, of police, of militiamen, and of others would immediately rush to the defense of society in the time of such peril. It is only the working class theoretically conceived of as a conscious unit and as practically unanimous in its revolutionary aims, in its methods, and in its revolt which can be considered as the ultimate economic power of modern society. The day of such a conscious and enlightened solidarity is, however, so far distant that the syndicalism which is based upon it falls of itself into a fantastic dream.

FOOTNOTES:

[W] His words are: "What is the General Confederation of Labor, if not the continuation of the International?" Documents et Souvenirs, Vol. IV, p. vii.

[X] In justice to the French unions it must be said that a large number, probably a considerable majority, do not share these views. The views of the latter are almost identical with those of the American and English unions; but at present the new anarchists are in the saddle, although their power appears to be waning.

[Y] See pp. 234, 235, supra.

[Z] See p. 52, supra.

[AA] I have not dealt in this chapter with the Industrial Workers of the World, which is the American representative of syndicalist ideas. First, because the American organization has developed no theories of importance. Their chief work has been to popularize some of the French ideas. Second, because the I. W. W. has not yet won for itself a place in the labor movement. It has done much agitation, but as yet no organization to speak of. Furthermore, there is great confusion of ideas among the various factions and elements, and it would be difficult to state views which are held in common by all of them. It should be said, however, that all the American syndicalists have emphasized industrial unionism, that is to say, organization by industries instead of by crafts—an idea that the French lay no stress upon.

[AB] At the Sixth International Conference of the National Trade Union Centers, held in Paris, 1909, the French syndicalists endeavored to persuade the trade unions to hold periodical international trade-union congresses that would rival the international socialist congresses. The proposition was so strongly opposed by all countries except France that the motion was withdrawn.

[AC] The comments are by Plechanoff.[20]

[AD] It should, however, be pointed out that the German social democrats voted at first against the State ownership of railroads, because it was considered a military measure.

[AE] The committee on the general strike of the French Confederation said despairingly in 1900: "The idea of the general strike is sufficiently understood to-day. In repeatedly putting off the date of its coming, we risk discrediting it forever by enervating the revolutionary energies." Quoted by Levine, "The Labor Movement in France," p. 102.



CHAPTER XI

THE OLDEST ANARCHISM

It is perhaps just as well to begin this chapter by reminding ourselves that anarchy means literally no government. Consequently, there will be no laws. "I am ready to make terms, but I will have no laws," said Proudhon; adding, "I acknowledge none."[1] However revolutionary this may seem, it is, after all, not so very unlike what has always existed in the affairs of men. Without the philosophy of the idealist anarchist, with no pretense of justice or "nonsense" about equality, there have always been in this old world of ours those powerful enough to make and to break law, to brush aside the State and any and every other hindrance that stood in their path. "Laws are like spiders' webs," said Anacharsis, "and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them." He might have said, with equal truth, that, with or without laws, the rich and powerful have been able in the past to do very much as they pleased. For the poor and the weak there have always been, to be sure, hard and fast rules that they could not break through. But the rich and powerful have always managed to live more or less above the State or, at least, so to dominate the State that to all intents and purposes, other than their own, it did not exist. When Bakounin wrote his startling and now famous decree abolishing the State, he created no end of hilarity among the Marxists, but had Bakounin been Napoleon with his mighty army, or Morgan and Rockefeller with their great wealth, he could no doubt in some measure have carried out his wish. Without, however, either wealth or numbers behind him, Bakounin preached a polity that, up to the present, only the rich and powerful have been able even partly to achieve. The anarchy of Proudhon was visionary, humanitarian, and idealistic. At least he thought he was striving for a more humane social order than that of the present. But this older anarchism is as ancient as tyranny, and never at any moment has it ceased to menace human civilization. Based on a real mastery over the industrial and political institutions of mankind, this actual anarchy has never for long allowed the law, the Constitution, the State, or the flag to obstruct its path or thwart its avarice.

Moreover, under the anarchism proposed by Proudhon and Bakounin, the maintenance of property rights, public order, and personal security would be left to voluntary effort, that is to say, to private enterprise. As all things would be decided by mutual agreement, the only law would be a law of contracts, and that law would need to be enforced either by associations formed for that purpose or by professionals privately employed for that purpose. So far as one can see, then, the methods of the feudal lords would be revived, by which they hired their own personal armies or went shares in the spoils with their bandits, buccaneers, and assassins. By organizing their own military forces and maintaining them in comfort, they were able to rob, burn, and murder, in order to protect the wealth and power they had, or to gain more wealth and power. For them there was no law but that of a superior fighting force. There was an infinite variety of customs and traditions that were in the nature of laws, but even these were seldom allowed to stand in the way of those who coveted, and were strong enough to take, the land, the money, or the produce of others. Indeed, the feudal duke or prince was all that Nechayeff claimed for the modern robber. He was a glorified anarchist, "without phrase, without rhetoric." He could scour Europe for mercenaries, and, when he possessed himself of an army of marauders, he became a law unto himself. The most ancient and honorable anarchy is despotism, and its most effective and available means of domination have always been the employment of its own personal military forces.

It will be remembered that Bakounin developed a kind of robber worship. The bandit leaders Stenka Razin and Pougatchoff appeared to him as national heroes, popular avengers, and irreconcilable enemies of the State. He conceived of the brigands scattered throughout Russia and confined in the prisons of the Empire as "a unique and indivisible world, strongly bound together—the world of the Russian revolution." The robber was "the wrestler in life and in death against all this civilization of officials, of nobles, of priests, and of the crown." Of course, Bakounin says here much that is historically true. Thieves, marauders, highwaymen, bandits, brigands, villains, mendicants, and all those other elements of mediaeval life for whom society provided neither land nor occupation, often organized themselves into guerilla bands in order to war upon all social and civil order. But Bakounin neglects to mention that it was these very elements that eagerly became the mercenaries of any prince who could feed them. They were lawless, "without phrase, without rhetoric," and, if anyone were willing to pay them, they would gladly pillage, burn, and murder in his interest. They would have served anybody or anything—the State, society, a prince, or a tyrant. They had no scruples and no philosophies. They were in the market to be bought by anyone who wanted a choice brand of assassins. And the feudal duke or prince bought, fed, and cared for these "veritable and unique revolutionists," in order to have them ready for service in his work of robbery and murder. To be sure, when these marauders had no employer they were dangerous, because then they committed crimes and outrages on their own hook. But the vast majority of them were hirelings, and many of them achieved fame for the bravery of their exploits in the service of the dukes, the princes, and the priests of that time. There were even guilds of mercenaries, such as the Condottieri of Italy; and the Swiss were famous for their superior service. They were, it seems, revolutionists in Bakounin's use of the term, and every prince knew "no money, no Swiss" ("point d'argent, point de Suisse").

A very slight acquaintance with history teaches us that this anarchy has been checked and that the history of recent times consists largely of the struggles of the masses to harness and subdue this anarchy of the powerful. And perhaps the most notable step in that direction was that development of the State which took away the right of the nobles to employ and maintain their own private armies. In England, policing by the State began as late as 1826, when Sir Robert Peel passed the law establishing the Metropolitan force in London, and these agents of order are even now called "Bobbies" and "Peelers," in memory of him. Throughout all Europe the military, naval, and police forces are to-day in the hands of the State. We have, then, in contradistinction to the old anarchy, the State maintenance of law and order, and of protection to life and property. Even in Russia the coercive forces are under the control of the Government, and nowhere are individuals—be they Grand Dukes or Princes—allowed to employ their own military forces. When trouble arises without, it is the State that calls together its armed men for aggression or for defense. When trouble arises within—such as strikes, riots, and insurrections—it is the State that is supposed to deal with them. Individuals, no matter how powerful, are not to-day permitted to organize armies to invade a foreign land, to subdue its people, and to wrest from them their property. In the case of uprisings within a country, the individual is not allowed to raise his armies, subdue the troublesome elements, and make himself master. Within the last few centuries the State has thus gradually drawn to itself the powers of repression, of coercion, and of aggression, and it is the State alone that is to-day allowed to maintain military forces.

At any rate, this is true of all civilized countries except the United States. This is the only modern State wherein coercive military powers are still wielded by individuals. In the United States it is still possible for rich and powerful individuals or for corporations to employ their own bands of armed men. If any legislator were to propose a law allowing any man or group of men to have their own private battleships and to organize their own private navies and armies, or if anyone suggested the turning over of the coercive powers of the State to private enterprise, the masses would rise in rebellion against the project. No congressman would, of course, venture to suggest such a law, and few individuals would undertake to defend such a plan. Yet the fact is that now, without legal authority, private armies may be employed and are indeed actually employed in the United States. In the most stealthy and insidious manner there has grown up within the last fifty years an extensive and profitable commerce for supplying to the lords of finance their own private police. And the strange fact appears that the newest, and supposedly the least feudal, country is to-day the only country that allows the oldest anarchists to keep in their hands the power to arm their own mercenaries and, in the words of an eminent Justice, to expose "the lives of citizens to the murderous assaults of hireling assassins."[2] It is with these "hireling assassins," who, for the convenience of the wealthy, are now supplied by a great network of agencies, that we shall chiefly concern ourselves in this chapter. We must here leave Europe, since it is in the United States alone that the workings of this barbarous commerce in anarchy can be observed.

Robert A. Pinkerton was the originator of a system of extra-legal police agents that has gradually grown to be one of the chief commercial enterprises of the country. According to his own testimony,[3] he began in 1866 to supply armed men to the owners of large industries, and ever since his firm has carried on a profitable business in that field. Envious of his prosperity, other individuals have formed rival agencies, and to-day there exist in the United States thousands of so-called detective bureaus where armed men can be employed to do the bidding of any wealthy individual. While, no doubt, there are agencies that conduct a thoroughly legitimate business, there are unquestionably numerous agencies in this country where one may employ thugs, thieves, incendiaries, dynamiters, perjurers, jury-fixers, manufacturers of evidence, strike-breakers and murderers. A regularly established commerce exists, which enables a rich man, without great difficulty or peril, to hire abandoned criminals, who, for certain prices, will undertake to execute any crime. If one can afford it, one may have always at hand a body of highwaymen or a small private army. Such a commerce as this was no doubt necessary and proper in the Middle Ages and would no doubt be necessary and proper in a state of anarchy, but when individuals are allowed to employ private police, armies, thugs, and assassins in a country which possesses a regularly established State, courts, laws, military forces, and police the traffic constitutes a menace as alarming as the Black Hand, the Camorra, or the Mafia. The story of these hired terrorists and of this ancient anarchy revived surpasses in cold-blooded criminality any other thing known in modern history. That rich and powerful patrons should be allowed to purchase in the market poor and desperate criminals eager to commit any crime on the calendar for a few dollars, is one of the most amazing and incredible anachronisms of a too self-complaisant Republic.

For some reason not wholly obscure the American people generally have been kept in such ignorance of the facts of this commerce that few even dream that it exists. And I am fully conscious of the need for proof in support of what to many must appear to be unwarranted assertions. Indeed, it is rare to find anyone who suspects the character of the private detective. The general impression seems to be that he performs a very useful and necessary service, that the profession is an honorable one, and that the mass of detectives have only one ambition in life, and that is to ferret out the criminal and to bring him to justice. To denounce detectives as a class appears to most persons as absurdly unreasonable. To speak of them with contempt is to convey the impression that detectives stand in the way of some evil schemes of their detractor. Fiction of a peculiarly American sort has built up among the people an exalted conception of the sleuth. And it must appear with rather a shock to those persons who have thus idealized the detective to learn that thousands of men who have been in the penitentiaries are constantly in the employ of the detective agencies. In a society which makes it almost impossible for an ex-convict to earn an honorable living it is no wonder that many of them grasp eagerly at positions offered them as "strike-breakers" and as "special officers." The first and most important thing, then, in this chapter is to prove, with perhaps undue detail, the ancient saying that "you must be a thief to catch a thief," and that possibly for that proverbial reason many private detectives are schooled and practiced in crime.

So far as I know, the first serious attempt to inform the general public of the real character of American detectives and to tell of their extensive traffic in criminality was made by a British detective, who, after having been stationed in America for several years, was impelled to make public the alarming conditions which he found. This was Thomas Beet, the American representative of the famous John Conquest, ex-Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, who, in a public statement, declared his astonishment that "few ... recognize in them [detective agencies] an evil which is rapidly becoming a vital menace to American society. Ostensibly conducted for the repression and punishment of crime, they are in fact veritable hotbeds of corruption, trafficking upon the honor and sacred confidences of their patrons and the credulity of the public, and leaving in their wake an aftermath of disgrace, disaster, and even death."[4] He pointed out the odium that must inevitably attach itself to the very name "private detective," unless society awakens and protects in some manner the honest members of the profession. "It may seem a sweeping statement," he says, "but I am morally convinced that fully ninety per cent. of the private detective establishments, masquerading in whatever form, are rotten to the core and simply exist and thrive upon a foundation of dishonesty, deceit, conspiracy, and treachery to the public in general and their own patrons in particular."[5]

The statements of Thomas Beet are, however, not all of this general character, and he specifically says: "I know that there are detectives at the head of prominent agencies in this country whose pictures adorn the rogues' gallery; men who have served time in various prisons for almost every crime on the calendar.... Thugs and thieves and criminals don the badge and outward semblance of the honest private detective in order that they may prey upon society.... Private detectives such as I have described do not, as a usual thing, go out to learn facts, but rather to make, at all costs, the evidence desired by the patron."[6] He shows the methods of trickery and deceit by which these detectives blackmail the wealthy, and the various means they employ for convicting any man, no matter how innocent, of any crime. "We shudder when we hear of the system of espionage maintained in Russia," he adds, "while in the great American cities, unnoticed, are organizations of spies and informers."[7] It is interesting to get the views of an impartial and expert observer upon this rapidly growing commerce in espionage, blackmail, and assault, and no less interesting is the opinion of the most notable American detective, William J. Burns, on the character of these men. Speaking of detectives he declared that, "as a class, they are the biggest lot of blackmailing thieves that ever went unwhipped of justice."[8] Only a short time before Burns made this remark the late Magistrate Henry Steinert, according to reports in the New York press, grew very indignant in his court over the shooting of a young lad by these private officers. "I think it an outrage," he declared, "that the Police Commissioner is enabled to furnish police power to these special officers, many of them thugs, men out of work, some of whom would commit murder for two dollars. Most of the arrests which have been made by these men have been absolutely unwarranted. In nearly every case one of these special officers had first pushed a gun into the prisoner's face. The shooting last night when a boy was killed shows the result of giving power to such men. It is a shame and a disgrace to the Police Department of the city that such conditions are allowed to exist."[9]

Anyone who will take the time to search through the testimony gathered by various governmental commissions will find an abundance of evidence indicating that many of these special officers and private detectives are in reality thugs and criminals. As long ago as 1892 an inquiry was made into the character of the men who were sent to deal with a strike at Homestead, Pennsylvania. A well-known witness testified: "We find that one is accused of wife-murder, four of burglary, two of wife-beating, and one of arson."[10] A thoroughly reliable and responsible detective, who had been in the United States secret service, also gave damaging testimony. "They were the scum of the earth.... There is not one out of ten that would not commit murder; that you could not hire him to commit murder or any other crime." Furthermore, he declared, "I would not believe any detective under oath without his evidence was corroborated." He spoke of ex-convicts being employed, and alleged that the manager of one of the large agencies "was run out of Cincinnati for blackmail."[11] Similar statements were made by another detective, named Le Vin, to the Industrial Commission of the United States when it was investigating the Chicago labor troubles of 1900. He declared that the Contractors' Association of Chicago had come to him repeatedly to employ sluggers, and that on one occasion the employers had told him to put Winchesters in the hands of his men and to manage somehow to get into a fight with the pickets and the strikers. The Commission, evidently surprised at this testimony, asked Mr. Le Vin whether it was possible to hire detectives to beat up men. His answer was: "You cannot hire every man to do it." "Q. 'But can they hire men?' A. 'Yes, they could hire men.'

"Q. 'From other private detective agencies?' A. 'Unfortunately, from some, yes.'"[12]

In the hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, August 13, 1912, lengthy testimony was given concerning a series of two hundred assaults that had been made upon the union molders of Milwaukee during a strike in 1906. One of the leaders of the union was killed, while others were brutally attacked by thugs in the employ of a Chicago detective agency. A serious investigation was begun by Attorney W. B. Rubin, acting for the Molders' Union, and in court the evidence clearly proved that the Chicago detective agency employed ex-convicts and other criminals for the purposes of slugging, shooting, and even killing union men. When some of these detectives were arrested they testified that they had acted under strict instructions. They had been sent out to beat up certain men. Sometimes these men were pointed out to them, at other times they were given the names of the men that were to be slugged. They told the amounts that they had been paid, of the lead pipe, two feet long, which they had used for the assault, and of the fact that they were all armed. There was also testimony given that nearly twenty-two thousand dollars had been paid by one firm to this one detective agency for services of this character. It was also shown that immediately after the assaults were committed the thugs were, if possible, shipped out of town for a few days; but, if they were arrested, they were defended by able attorneys and their fines paid. Although many assaults were committed where no arrests could be made, over forty "detectives" were actually arrested, and, when brought into court, were found guilty of crimes ranging from disturbing the peace and carrying concealed weapons to aggravated assault and shooting with intent to kill. Many of these detectives convicted in Milwaukee had been previously convicted of similar crimes committed in other cities. Although some of them had long criminal records, they were, nevertheless, regularly in the employ of the detective agency. It appeared in one trial that one of the men employed was very much incensed when he saw three of his associates attack a union molder with clubs, knocking him down and beating him severely. With indignation he protested against the outrage. When the head of the agency heard of this the man was discharged. The court records also show that the head of the detective agency had gone himself to Chicago to secure two men to undertake what proved to be a fatal assault upon a trade-union leader named Peter J. Cramer. When arrested and brought into court they testified that they received twenty dollars per day for their services.

Equally direct and positive evidence concerning the character of the men supplied by detective agencies for strike-breaking and other purposes is found in the annual report of the Chicago & Great Western Railway for the period ending in the spring of the year 1908. "To man the shops and roundhouses," says the report, "the company was compelled to resort to professional strike-breakers, a class of men who are willing to work during the excitement and dangers of personal injury which attend strikes, but who refuse to work longer than the excitement and dangers last.... Perhaps ten per cent. of the first lot of strike-breakers were fairly good mechanics, but fully 90 per cent, knew nothing about machinery, and had to be gotten rid of. To get rid of such men, however, is easier said than done.

"The first batch which was discharged, consisting of about 100 men, refused to leave the barricade, made themselves a barricade within the company's barricade, and, producing guns and knives, refused to budge. The company's fighting men, after a day or two, forced them out of the barricade and into a special train, which carried them under guard to Chicago." Here was one gang of hired criminals, "the company's fighting men," called into service to fight another gang, the company's strike-breakers. The character of these "detectives," as testified to in this case by the employers, appears to have been about the same as that of those described by "Kid" Hogan, who, after an experience as a strike-breaker, told the New York Sunday World: "There was the finest bunch of crooks and grafters working as strike-breakers in those American Express Company strikes you would ever want to see. I was one of 'em and know what I am talking about. That gang of grafters cost the Express Company a pile of money. Why, they used to start trouble themselves just to keep their jobs a-going and to get a chance to swipe stuff off the wagons.

"It was the same way down at Philadelphia on the street car strike. Those strike-breakers used to get a car out somewhere in the suburbs and then get off and smash up the windows, tip the car over, and put up an awful holler about being attacked by strikers, just so they'd have to be kept on the job."[13]

Thus we see that some American "detective" agencies have many and varied trades. But they not only supply strike-breakers, perjurers, spies, and even assassins, they have also been successful in making an utter farce of trial by jury. It appears that even some of the best known American detectives are not above the packing of a jury. At least, such was the startling charge made by Attorney-General George W. Wickersham, May 10, 1912. In the report to President Taft Mr. Wickersham accused the head of one of the chief detective agencies of the country of fixing a jury in California. The agents of this detective, with the cooeperation of the clerk of the court, investigated the names of proposed jurors. In order to be sure of getting a jury that would convict, the record of each individual was carefully gone into and a report handed to the prosecuting attorneys. Some of the comments on the jurors follow: "Convictor from the word go." "Socialist. Anti-Mitchell." "Convictor from the word go; just read the indictment. Populist." "Think he is a Populist. If so, convictor. Good, reliable man." "Convictor. Democrat. Hates Hermann." "Hidebound Democrat. Not apt to see any good in a Republican." "Would be apt to be for conviction." "He is apt to wish Mitchell hung. Think he would be a fair juror." "Would be likely to convict any Republican politician." "Convictor." "Would convict Christ." "Convict Christ. Populist." "Convict anyone. Democrat."[14] This great detective even had the audacity, it seems, to telegraph William Scott Smith, at that time secretary to the Hon. E. A. Hitchcock, the Secretary of the Interior: "Jury commissioners cleaned out old box from which trial jurors were selected and put in 600 names, every one of which was investigated before they were placed in the box. This confidential."[15] It is impossible to reproduce here some of the language of this great detective. The foul manner in which he comments upon the character of the jurors is altogether worthy of his vocation. That, however, is unimportant compared to the more serious fact that a well-paid detective can so pervert trial by jury that it would "convict Christ."

I shall be excused in a matter so devastating to republican institutions as this if I quote further from the disclosures of Thomas Beet: "There is another phase," he says, "of the private detective evil which has worked untold damage in America. This is the private constabulary system by which armed forces are employed during labor troubles. It is a condition akin to the feudal system of warfare, when private interests can employ troops of mercenaries to wage war at their command. Ostensibly, these armed private detectives are hurried to the scene of the trouble to maintain order and prevent destruction of property, although this work always should be left to the official guardians of the peace. That there is a sinister motive back of the employment of these men has been shown time and again. Have you ever followed the episodes of a great strike and noticed that most of the disorderly outbreaks were so guided as to work harm to the interests of the strikers?... Private detectives, unsuspected in their guise of workmen, mingle with the strikers and by incendiary talk or action sometimes stir them up to violence. When the workmen will not participate, it is an easy matter to stir up the disorderly faction which is invariably attracted by a strike, although it has no connection therewith.

"During a famous strike of car builders in a western city some years ago, ... to my knowledge much of the lawlessness was incited by private detectives, who led mobs in the destruction of property. In one of the greatest of our strikes, that involving the steel industry, over two thousand armed detectives were employed supposedly to protect property, while several hundred more were scattered in the ranks of strikers as workmen. Many of the latter became officers in the labor bodies, helped to make laws for the organizations, made incendiary speeches, cast their votes for the most radical movements made by the strikers, participated in and led bodies of the members in the acts of lawlessness that eventually caused the sending of State troops and the declaration of martial law. While doing this, these spies within the ranks were making daily reports of the plans and purposes of the strikers. To my knowledge, when lawlessness was at its height and murder ran riot, these men wore little patches of white on the lapels of their coats that their fellow detectives of the 'two thousand' would not shoot them down by mistake.... In no other country in the world, with the exception of China, is it possible for an individual to surround himself with a standing army to do his bidding in defiance of law and order."[16]

That the assertions of Thomas Beet are well founded can, I think, be made perfectly clear by three tragic periods in the history of labor disputes in America. At Homestead in 1892, in the railway strikes of 1894, and in Colorado during the labor wars of 1903-1904 detectives were employed on a large scale. For reasons of space I shall limit myself largely to these cases, which, without exaggeration, are typical of conditions which constantly arise in the United States. Within the last year West Virginia has been added to the list. Incredible outrages have been committed there by the mine guards. They have deliberately murdered men in some cases, and, on one dark night in February last, they sent an armored train into Holly Grove and opened fire with machine guns upon a sleeping village of miners. They have beaten, clubbed, and stabbed men and women in the effort either to infuriate them into open war, or to reduce them to abject slavery. Unfortunately, at this time the complete report of the Senate investigation has not been issued, and it seems better to confine these pages to those facts only that careful inquiry has proved unquestionable. We are fortunate in having the reports of public officials—certainly unbiased on the side of labor—to rely upon for the facts concerning the use of thugs and hirelings in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Colorado during three terrible battles between capital and labor.

The story of the shooting of Henry C. Frick by Alexander Berkman is briefly referred to in the first chapter, but the events which led up to that shooting have well-nigh been forgotten. Certainly, nothing could have created more bitterness among the working classes than the act of the Carnegie Steel Company when it ordered a detective agency to send to Homestead three hundred men armed with Winchester rifles. There was the prospect of a strike, and it appears that the management was in no mood to parley with its employees, and that nineteen days before any trouble occurred the Carnegie Steel Company opened negotiations for the employment of a private army. It had been the custom of the Carnegie Company to meet the representatives of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers from time to time and at these conferences to agree upon wages. On June 30, 1892, the agreement expired, and previous to that date the Company announced a reduction of wages, declaring that the new scale would terminate in January instead of June. The employees rejected the proposed terms, principally on the ground that they could not afford to strike in midwinter and in that case they would not be able to resist a further reduction in wages. Upon receiving this statement the company locked out its employees and the battle began.

The steel works were surrounded by a fence three miles long, fifteen feet in height, and covered with barbed wire. It was called "Fort Frick," and the three hundred detectives were to be brought down the river by boat and landed in the fort. Morris Hillquit gives the following account of the pitched battle that occurred in the early morning hours of July 6: "As soon as the boat carrying the Pinkertons was sighted by the pickets the alarm was sounded. The strikers were aroused from their sleep and within a few minutes the river front was covered with a crowd of coatless and hatless men armed with guns and rifles and grimly determined to prevent the landing of the Pinkertons. The latter, however, did not seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation. They sought to intimidate the strikers by assuming a threatening attitude and aiming the muzzles of their shining revolvers at them. A moment of intense expectation followed. Then a shot was fired from the boat and one of the strikers fell to the ground mortally wounded. A howl of fury and a volley of bullets came back from the line of the strikers, and a wild fusillade was opened on both sides. In vain did the strike leaders attempt to pacify the men and to stop the carnage—the strikers were beyond control. The struggle lasted several hours, after which the Pinkertons retreated from the river bank and withdrew to the cabin of the boat. There they remained in the sweltering heat of the July sun without air or ventilation, under the continuing fire of the enraged men on the shore, until they finally surrendered. They were imprisoned by the strikers in a rink, and in the evening they were sent out of town by rail. The number of dead on both sides was twelve, and over twenty were seriously wounded."[17]

These events aroused the entire country, and the state of mind among the working people generally was exceedingly bitter. It was a tension that under certain circumstances might have provoked a civil war. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives immediately appointed committees to inquire into this movement from state to state of armed men, and the employment by corporations of what amounted to a private army. It seems to have been clearly established that the employers wanted war, and that the attorney of the Carnegie Company had commanded the local sheriff to deputize a man named Gray, who was to meet the mercenaries and make all of them deputy sheriffs. This plan to make the detectives "legal" assassins did not carry, and the result was that a band of paid thugs, thieves, and murderers invaded Homestead and precipitated a bloody conflict. This was, of course, infamous, and, compared with its magnificent anarchy, Berkman's assault was child-like in its simplicity. Yet the enthusiastic and idealistic Berkman spent seventeen years in prison and is still abhorred; while no one responsible for the murder of twelve workingmen and the wounding of twenty others, either among the mercenaries or their employers, has yet been apprehended or convicted. With such equality of justice do we treat these agents of the two anarchies!

However, if Berkman spent seventeen years in prison, the other anarchists were mildly rebuked by the Committee of Investigation appointed by the Senate. "Your committee is of the opinion," runs the report, "that the employment of the private armed guards at Homestead was unnecessary. There is no evidence to show that the slightest damage was done, or attempted to be done, to property on the part of the strikers...."[18] "It was claimed by the Pinkerton agency that in all cases they require that their men shall be sworn in as deputy sheriffs, but it is a significant circumstance that in the only strike your committee made inquiry concerning—that at Homestead—the fact was admitted on all hands that the armed men supplied by the Pinkertons were not so sworn, and that as private citizens acting under the direction of such of their own men as were in command they fired upon the people of Homestead, killing and wounding a number."[19] "Every man who testified, including the proprietors of the detective agencies, admitted that the workmen are strongly prejudiced against the so-called Pinkertons, and that their presence at a strike serves to unduly inflame the passions of the strikers. The prejudice against them arises partly from the fact that they are frequently placed among workmen, in the disguise of mechanics, to report alleged conversations to their agencies, which, in turn, is transmitted to the employers of labor. Your committee is impressed with the belief that this is an utterly vicious system, and that it is responsible for much of the ill-feeling and bad blood displayed by the working classes. No self-respecting laborer or mechanic likes to feel that the man beside him may be a spy from a detective agency, and especially so when the laboring man is utterly at the mercy of the detective, who can report whatever he pleases, be it true or false....[20] Whether assumedly legal or not, the employment of armed bodies of men for private purposes, either by employers or employees, is to be deprecated and should not be resorted to. Such use of private armed men is an assumption of the State's authority by private citizens. If the State is incapable of protecting citizens in their rights of person and property, then anarchy is the result, and the original law of force should neither be approved, encouraged, nor tolerated until all known legal processes have failed."[21]

We must leave this black page in American history with such comfort as we can wring from the fact that the modern exponents of the oldest anarchy have been at least once rebuked, and with the further satisfaction that the Homestead tragedy brought momentarily to the attention of the entire nation a practice which even at that time was a source of great alarm to many serious men. In the great strikes which occurred in the late eighties and early nineties there was a great deal of violence, and C. H. Salmons, in his history of "The Burlington Strike" of 1888, relates how private detectives systematically planned outrages that destroyed property and how others committed murder. A few cases were fought out in the courts with results very disconcerting to the railroads who had hired these private detectives. In the strike on the New York Central Railroad which occurred in 1890 many detectives were employed. They were, of course, armed, and, as a result of certain criminal operations undertaken by them, Congress was asked to consider the drafting of a bill "to prevent corporations engaged in interstate-commerce traffic from employing unjustifiably large bodies of armed men denominated 'detectives,' but clothed with no legal functions."[22] Roger A. Pryor, then Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, vigorously protested against these "watchmen." "I mean," he said, "the enlistment of banded and armed mercenaries under the command of private detectives on the side of corporations in their conflicts with employees. The pretext for such an extraordinary measure is the protection of the corporate property; and surely the power of this great State is adequate to the preservation of the public order and security. At all events, in this particular instance, it was not pretended either that the strikers had invaded property or person, or that the police or militia in Albany had betrayed reluctance or inability to cope with the situation. On the contrary, the facts are undisputed that the moment the men went out Mr. Pinkerton and his myrmidons appeared on the scene, and the police of Albany declared their competency to repel any trespass on person or property. The executive of the State, too, denied any necessity for the presence of the military.

"I do not impute to the railroad officials a purpose, without provocation, to precipitate their ruffians upon a defenseless and harmless throng of spectators; but the fact remains that the ruffians in their hire did shoot into the crowd without occasion, and did so shed innocent blood. And it is enough to condemn the system that it authorizes unofficial and irresponsible persons to usurp the most delicate and difficult functions of the State and exposes the lives of citizens to the murderous assaults of hireling assassins, stimulated to violence by panic or by the suggestion of employers to strike terror by an appalling exhibition of force. If the railroad company may enlist armed men to defend its property, the employees may enlist armed men to defend their persons, and thus private war be inaugurated, the authority of the State defied, the peace and tranquillity of society destroyed, and the citizens exposed to the hazard of indiscriminate slaughter."[23]

Perhaps the most extensive use of these so-called detectives was at the time of the great railway strike of 1894. The strike of the workers at Pullman led to a general sympathetic strike on all the railroads entering Chicago, and from May 11 to July 13 there was waged one of the greatest industrial battles in American history. A railway strike is always a serious matter, and in a short time the Government came to the active support of the railroads. At one time over fourteen thousand soldiers, deputy marshals, deputy sheriffs, and policemen were on duty in Chicago. During the period of the strike twelve persons were shot and fatally wounded. A number of riots occurred, cars were burned, and, as a result of the disturbances, no less than seven hundred persons were arrested, accused of murder, arson, burglary, assault, intimidation, riot, and other crimes. The most accurate information we have concerning conditions in Chicago during the strike is to be found in the evidence which was taken by the United States Strike Commission appointed by President Cleveland July 26, 1894. There seems to be no doubt that during the early days of the strike perfect peace reigned in Chicago. At the very beginning of the trouble three hundred strikers were detailed by the unions to guard the property of the Pullman company from any interference or destruction. "It is in evidence, and uncontradicted," reports the Commission, "that no violence or destruction of property by strikers or sympathizers took place at Pullman."[24] It also appears that no violence occurred in Chicago in connection with the strike until after several thousand men were made United States deputy marshals. These "United States deputy marshals," says the Commission, "to the number of 3,600, were selected by and appointed at the request of the General Managers' Association, and of its railroads. They were armed and paid by the railroads."[25] In other words, the United States Government gave over its police power directly into the hands of one of the combatants. It allowed these private companies, through detective agencies, to collect as hastily as possible a great body of unemployed, to arm them, and to send them out as officials of the United States to do whatsoever was desired by the railroads. They were not under the control of the army or of responsible United States officials, and their intrusion into a situation so tense and critical as that then existing in Chicago was certain to produce trouble. And the fact is, the lawlessness that prevailed in Chicago during that strike began only after the appearance of these private "detectives."

It will astonish the ordinary American citizen to read of the character of the men to whom the maintenance of law and order was entrusted. Superintendent of Police Brennan referred to these deputy marshals in an official report to the Council of Chicago as "thugs, thieves, and ex-convicts," and in his testimony before the Commission itself he said: "Some of the deputy marshals who are now over in the county jail ... were arrested while deputy marshals for highway robbery."[26] Several newspaper men, when asked to testify regarding the character of these United States deputies, referred to them variously as "drunkards," "loafers," "bums," and "criminals." The now well-known journalist, Ray Stannard Baker, was at that time reporting the strike for the Chicago Record. He was asked by Commissioner Carroll D. Wright as to the character of the United States deputy marshals. His answer was: "From my experience with them I think it was very bad indeed. I saw more cases of drunkenness, I believe, among the United States deputy marshals than I did among the strikers."[27] Benjamin H. Atwell, reporter for the Chicago News, testified: "Many of the marshals were men I had known around Chicago as saloon characters.... The first day, I believe, after the troops arrived ... the deputy marshals went up into town and some of them got pretty drunk."[28] Malcomb McDowell, reporter for the Chicago Record, testified that the deputy marshals and deputy sheriffs "were not the class of men who ought to be made deputy marshals or deputy sheriffs.... They seemed to be hunting trouble all the time.... At one time a serious row nearly resulted because some of the deputy marshals standing on the railroad track jeered at the women that passed and insulted them.... I saw more deputy sheriffs and deputy marshals drunk than I saw strikers drunk."[29] Harold I. Cleveland, reporter for the Chicago Herald, testified: "I was ... on the Western Indiana tracks for fourteen days ... and I suppose I saw in that time a couple of hundred deputy marshals.... I think they were a very low, contemptible set of men."[30]

In Mr. Baker's testimony he speaks of seeing in one of the riots "a big, rough-looking fellow, whom the people called 'Pat.'"[31] He was the leader of the mob, and when the riot was over, "he mounted a beer keg in front of one of the saloons and advised men to go home, get their guns, and come out and fight the troops, fire on them.... The same man appeared two nights later at Whiting, Indiana, and made quite a disturbance there, roused the people up. In all that mob that had hold of the ropes I do not think there were many American Railway Union men. I think they were mostly roughs from Chicago.... The police knew well enough all about this man I have mentioned who was the ringleader of the mob, but they did nothing and the deputy marshals were not any better."[32] For some inscrutable reason, certain men, none of whom were railroad employees, were allowed openly to provoke violence. Fortunately, however, they were not able to induce the actual strikers to participate in their assaults upon railroad property, and every newspaper man testified that the riots were, in the main, the work of the vicious elements of Chicago. They were, said one witness, "all loafers, idlers, a petty class of criminals well known to the police."[33] Malcomb McDowell testified concerning one riot which he had reported for the papers: "The men did not look like railroad men.... Most of them were foreigners, and one of the men in the crowd told me afterward that he was a detective from St. Louis. He gave me the name of the agency at the time."[34]

Mr. Eugene V. Debs, the leader of that great strike, in a pamphlet entitled The Federal Government and the Chicago Strike, calls particular attention to the following declaration of the United States Strike Commission: "There is no evidence before the Commission that the officers of the American Railway Union at any time participated in or advised intimidation, violence or destruction of property. They knew and fully appreciated that, as soon as mobs ruled, the organized forces of society would crush the mobs and all responsible for them in the remotest degree, and that this means defeat."[35] Commenting upon this statement, Mr. Debs asks: "To whose interest was it to have riots and fires, lawlessness and crime? To whose advantage was it to have disreputable 'deputies' do these things? Why were only freight cars, largely hospital wrecks, set on fire? Why have the railroads not yet recovered damages from Cook County, Illinois, for failing to protect their property?... The riots and incendiarism turned defeat into victory for the railroads. They could have won in no other way. They had everything to gain and the strikers everything to lose. The violence was instigated in spite of the strikers, and the report of the Commission proves that they made every effort in their power to preserve the peace."[36]

This history is important in a study of the extensive system of subsidized violence that has grown up in America. Nearly every witness before the Commission testified that the strikers again and again gave the police valuable assistance in protecting the property of the railroads. No testimony was given that the workingmen advocated violence or that union men assisted in the riots. The ringleaders of all the serious outbreaks were notorious toughs from Chicago's vicious sections, and they were allowed to go for days unmolested by the deputy marshals—who, although representatives of the United States Government, were in the pay of the railroads. In fact, the evidence all points to the one conclusion, that the deputy marshals encouraged the violence of ruffians and tried to provoke the violence of decent men by insulting, drunken, and disreputable conduct. The strikers realized that violence was fatal to their cause, and the deputy marshals knew that violence meant victory for the railroads. And that proved to be the case.

Before leaving this phase of anarchy I want to refer as briefly as possible to that series of fiercely fought political and industrial battles that occurred in Colorado in the period from 1894 to 1904. The climax of the long-drawn-out battles there was perhaps the most unadulterated anarchy that has yet been seen in America. It was a terrorism of powerful and influential anarchists who frankly and brutally answered those who protested against their many violations of the United States Constitution: "To hell with the Constitution!"[37] The story of these Colorado battles is told in a report of an investigation made by the United States Commissioner of Labor (1905). The reading of that report leaves one with the impression that present-day society rests upon a volcano, which in favorable periods seems very harmless indeed, but, when certain elemental forces clash, it bursts forth in a manner that threatens with destruction civilization itself. The trouble in Colorado began with the effort on the part of the miners' union to obtain through the legislature a law limiting the day's work to eight hours in all underground mines and in all work for reducing and refining ores. That was in 1894. The next year an eight-hour bill was presented in the legislature. Expressing fear that such a bill might be unconstitutional, the legislature, before acting upon it, asked the Supreme Court to render a decision. The Supreme Court replied that, in its opinion, such a bill would be unconstitutional. In 1899, as a result of further agitation by the miners, an eight-hour law was enacted by the legislature—a large majority in both houses voting for the bill. By unanimous decision the same year the Supreme Court of Colorado declared the statute unconstitutional. The miners were not, however, discouraged, and they began a movement to secure the adoption of a constitutional amendment which would provide for the enactment of an eight-hour law. All the political parties in the State of Colorado pledged themselves in convention to support such a measure. In the general election of 1902 the constitutional amendment providing for an eight-hour day was adopted by the people of the State by 72,980 votes against 26,266. This was a great victory for the miners, and it seemed as if their work was done. According to all the traditions and pretensions of political life, they had every reason to believe that the next session of the legislature would pass an eight-hour law. It appears, however, that the corporations had determined at all cost to defeat such a bill. They set out therefore to corrupt wholesale the legislature, and as a result the eight-hour bill was defeated. After having done everything in their power, patiently, peacefully, and legally to obtain their law, and only after having been outrageously betrayed by corrupt public servants, the miners as a last resort, on the 3d of July, 1903, declared a strike to secure through their own efforts what a decade of pleading and prayers had failed to achieve.