"Politics has much to do with it. Politicians of pretty high standing have been intimating a crisis. Political demagogs make large promises which they do not keep. Laboring men cannot get even small measures put through. A disposition to abandon attempts for political relief and to take matters into their own hands permeates labor.

"I am sorry to say that even in my own, the socialist party, an element has arisen, which says that politics and trades unions are too slow, and which advocates industrial autonomy, direct action and sabotage. Bill Haywood is its leader.

"Sabotage is French and a liberal English definition for it is, 'give them. the boot.' Practically it means anything from putting sand in the machinery to the biggest kind of destruction of property.

"The tendency of the militant laboring man is to smash somebody in the face. The McNamaras went the entire length and blew up a building.

"It is certainly unwise to overstate the case, because to do so is to add fuel to the flames. It seems to me, however, that there are indications of a serious condition.

"Employers of labor can do their part to avert serious trouble by dealing fairly with their men; giving them what is fairly coming to them as the result of their production.

"In the steel industry, for example, I can well remember the time when

employes of the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co. use to come downtown on pay day with from $75 to $150 apiece in their pockets, the earnings of a half month. Some of them do well now to earn nine dollars a week. In the old days, men in such industries were Welshmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen and Americans. Now they are Hungarians and others, newly from foreign, nonEnglish speaking countries. Nevertheless, they are learning their condition, and in due time they will make trouble.

"Indeed I do not look for trouble from well paid men, working eight

and nine hours a day. Such men are very generally contented. It is from the poorly paid, overworked men that trouble may be expected.

"Organization is the watchword of the hour. From the two hundred labor papers that come to my office I cannot begin to keep track of the new organizations constantly springing up in labor circles, but for an example note how an organization of 5,000, not connected with any large central organization sprang up in a night as it were, in the New York hotel strike.

"Reverting again to what employers may do, it is my experience and judgment that welfare plans do not fill any part of the bill. The men do not want soap and towels and flower beds at the works; they want such things at home. They want a little more welfare in their pay envelopes. Neither obstinacy nor fear of control slipping from them should deter employers to do their share toward improving a situation that looks serious. Their duty as citizens and their business interests alike should dictate this.

"For my own part, my entire mature life has been spent in an effort to induce workingmen to improve their condition peacefully, at the ballot box. I regard resorting to violence as calamitous and ineffective. Note labor's victory at McKee's Rock. No benefit followed that victory. Conditions today at McKee's Rock are the same as they were before the strike.

"The hope of the laboring man is to conduct his affairs intelligently and peacefully, so that his victories may be followed by lasting benefits to himself."

BY ELROY M. AVERY.

"The substitution of machinery for tools and the ownership of that machinery by the few has placed the workman at the pleasure of the man who is employing him. The workman is beginning to realize the fact.

"Labor is a perishable commodity. Today's labor must be sold today. In the days of our grandfathers, if a man did not like the way the man who employed him treated him, he set up a shop of his own. Today, he cannot do it. If, for instance, he is employed in a shoe shop, he cannot go out and make a shoe himself. He can make perhaps the heel of a shoe. He must sell his labor and he must do it that day. One cannot sell Monday's labor on Tuesday. The man with the shoe-making machinery is the only one to buy his labor. It is a restricted market. The workman realizes he is not the free man his forefather was.

"Until a few years ago, it was not so noticeable. Things did not cost so

much. Everybody got along pretty easily. Within the last ten years, however, things have tightened up. The cost of living is great. The workingman is waking up.

"He is like Gulliver, tied with many threads. Today, he is striving to snap those threads. Some have snapped already. They all will snap sooner or later, and as they snap, somebody will be hurt; some innocent bystander, no doubt, as is usually the case. But we cannot blame the workingman; it is natural he should snap the threads that bind him.

"He realizes he is not getting his

fair share of what he produces. That is the trouble with him.

"What will. the employers do about it? What they could do that would help would be to give the producer a fair share of what he produces. Some of them are fair. I can name some of these right in Cleveland, where I live; Samuel Mather, of Pickands, Mather & Co.; Earl W. Oglebay, of Oglebay, Norton & Co., and W. H. Canniff, of the Nickel Plate. Many of the employers,

I am afraid, will do it only when they see they will have to, in order to avoid big trouble.

"I believe the men would, generally speaking, be content with a fair share and not go on demanding more the more they got. That would not always be so, of course. Labor leaders are not always wise, nor are they always honest, any any more than any other class of men are always wise or always honest. Still, I know the rank and file of laboring men are honest and moreover they know, in my opinion, a great deal more than they are generally given credit for knowing.

"For instance, I believe that the average workingman fully realizes that big business is necessary; that the immense volume of production necessary for supplying 90,000,000 people cannot go forward without large. combinations of capital.

"There is another, though less important and far reaching cause for dissatisfaction and unrest among working people. The ostentatious display of wealth on the part of the greatly rich is irritating to them. To read in a newspaper, for instance, that the wife of a multimillionaire has spent forty thousand dollars on a singie, entertainment is naturally irritating to a man who has sent his children to bed hungry, or if not hungry, at all events needing something, especially when he is convinced that the distribution of production is unequal and that the man whose wife has spent forty thousand dollars on a single entertainment has obtained part of what he ought to have. Still, I do not regard this as very menacing, because I believe the average workingman sensibly recognizes that that sort of ostentatious extravagance is exceptional and that as a matter of fact the man of means does not do that sort of thing as a rule. The rich man of quiet inclination does not do it, and certainly the wise, rich man does not. Still, it is the subject of talk from on top of the barrel on the street corners on the part of the labor demagog: for labor has its demagogs as well as other lines of modern society."

"Anarchy" Says Editor

"Literal anarchy" and "organized lawlessness" are terms applied by Dr. Edward T. Devine, editor of The Survey, to the doctrines of direct action and class hatred, in his leading editorial of the week of June 1, 1912, issue. "Anarchy: from Below and from Above", is the title of the editorial, which starts by saying:

"In New England and in California there are disturbing indications of a disposition to appeal from the ordinary established institutions of society to a trial of force. Lawrence and San Diego are storm centers, but mutterings are to be heard also from other quarters of the horizon. Workmen are being told that the old-fashioned strike is futile. A new and better plan has been devised. They are to strike and at the same time remain at work. They are to draw pay from their masters, whom they are to hate with all the greater intensity, even as they practice the sabotage which means. destruction of property and the endangering of life and limb. Let us make no mistake about the meaning of the doctrine of the class conscious conflict as preached by those who advocate 'direct action'. It means literal anarchy, organized lawlessness, the overthrow by force not only of the existing government, but of the existing morality and social order. To deny this would be easily exposed hypocrisy. Those who believe in orderly community life, in the usefulness of private property, in respect for the person and established rights of others, in enforcing the obligations of contracts, in morality as against immorality, have absolutely no choice but to expose and oppose these teachings with all their strength."

This language flows from the pen of one who is by no means a labor hater, but who edits a journal designed to improve social conditions and who in the same editorial in which the above denunciation occurs says that, "nothing less than the abolition of poverty in the sense of the deprivation of the necessities of a normal human life will really satisfy the awakened twentieth century conscience."

Wild

Vicious attacks on labor leaders outside the Industrial Workers of the World, advice to disregard the law and give poor work to gain labor's ends and many other, at mildest, startling things, characterize the literature of the Solidarity literary bureau and the I. W. W. publishing bureau located at Newcastle, Pa. These publishing bureaus are engineered by the "Industrial Workers of the World".

Vincent St. John contributes two; a pamphlet, "The I. W. W., Its History, Structure and Methods", in which he says that the question of right and wrong does not concern the organization, and a leaflet, "Political Parties and the I. W. W." Other pamphlets are the work of William E. Trautman, a man unusually prominent in the order and in the industrial union movement, Edward McDonald and B. H. Williams, while leaflets are contributed by O. M. Stirton, Edward Hammond, E. S. Nelson, Oscar Ameringer, Walker C. Smith, "Rusty" Mitchell and Jean E. Spielman.

Perhaps the richest gem of literature in the lot is Walker C. Smith's pamphlet on "War and the Workers". The effort is an appeal to the worker not to join the army or navy. "Don't become hired murderers," adjures Walker, who also declares that:

"American capitalists want war with Japan in order to seize the rich Manchurian lands; gain railway, mining and other concessions; unload their surplus stock of shoddy goods upon the government; secure investment for their money in interest bearing bonds; and to kill off the surplus of unemployed workers who are threatening to overthrow the capitalist sys

tem.

"Let those who own the country do the fighting," Smith further writes. "Put the wealthiest in the front ranks; the middle class next; follow these with judges, lawyers, preachers and politicians. Let the

workers remain at home and enjoy what they produce. Follow a declaration of war with an immediate call for a general strike. Make the slogan: 'Rebellion sooner than war.' Do not make yourself a target in order to fatten Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, the Rothschilds, Guggenheim, and the other industrial pirates."

The I. W. W. doesn't care about union recognition, according to A. M. Stirton, in his leaflet on "Getting Recognition".

"Get the union that will get you the goods and you'll have the recognition," writes Stirton.

"If you bought a sack of potatoes and had them on your shoulder ready to take home, you wouldn't think of bantering with the storekeeper to give you a written certificate saying, 'This man has potatoes,' would you?

"Still less would you think of taking the certificate in place of the potatoes.

"If a highwayman held you up on your way home on payday and attempted to take your wad and you knocked him over with a club, you wouldn't think of asking him to sign a paper saying that he recognized that you had a club, would you?

"So long as you can put him out of the business of robbing you, you'd take it for granted that that was sufficient recognition, wouldn't you?

has proved successful on railroad systems in Austria and Italy.

"Temporary strike, that is, go on strike one day, go back to work the next, and so on, if deemed necessary to win the point in question.

"Opportune strike, that is, go on strike when the capitalist has orders that must be filled immediately, or when similar conditions give promise of victory."

Oscar Ameringer describes "Union Scabs and Others" in a leaflet. The union "scab", Ameringer says, often does not know he is a "scab". He is the man, the writer says, who continnes to work in a plant under trades unions conditions while some other branch of labor is en strike in that plant.

"Persuasion," writes Ameringer in effect in this pamphlet, "having no effect on the professional strikebreaker, he is sometimes treated with a brickbat shower, while union men belonging to a different craft than the one on strike receive, instead of brickbats and insults: 'Hello, John; hello, Jim howdy, Jack,' and other expressions of good fellowship.

"During a very bitterly fought molders' strike in a northern city, the writer noticed one of the prettiest illustrations of the working of plain scabbing and union scabbing.

"A dense mass of strikers and sympathizers had assembled in front of the factory waiting the exit of the strikebreakers. On they came, scabs and unionists in one dark mass. Stones, rotten eggs and other missiles began to fly, when one of the strikebreakers leaped on a store box and shouted frantically: 'Stop it, stop it; for's sake, stop it, you are hitting more unionists than scabs; you can't tell the difference.'

"That's it; whenever scabs and union men work harmoniously in the strikebreaking industry, all h- can't tell the difference."

Illustrative of the fine feeling existing toward labor leaders outside of the I. W. W. is an extract from W. E. Trautman's pamphlet on "Why Strikes are Lost", in which, discussing "Labor Vultures", Trautman writes: "They, whether their names be Gompers, Mitchell, Duncan, Tobin, Golden, Grant, Hamilton or what else, are the vultures, because they exist only by dividing the workers and separating one from another. They have been and are doing the bidding of the

master class. Upon them falls the awful curse of the world of millions.

They are the dark forces which the world should know as traitors, the real malefactors, the real instigators of the appalling defeats and betrayals of the proletarians. But what does it concern

the labor leaders? It is on these conditions that they are allowed to exist in their debaucheries, to continue their destructive work in the interests of capital."

Edward McDonald writes a pamphlet which is an appeal to the farm hand to join the Industrial Workers of the World.

In a pamphlet on "Eleven Blind Leaders", B. H. Williams undertakes to show that some of the most prominent socialists in the country have not the genius to grasp the proletarian standpoint of the question of socialism and its revolutionary outcome.

Williams names Eugene V. Debs, Victor L. Berger, Gaylord Wilshire, Upton Sinclair, Barney Berlyn, John C. Chase, William Mailly, Robert Hunter, A. M. Simons and J. M. Barnes.

STRIKE VIOLENCE

Many Examples of il in June

Throughout Country

Mob violence, death by bullets, property destruction, injury and misery characterized labor strikes in June, 1912.

Perth Amboy, N. J., furnished the most extreme situation. Here the employes of the American Smelting & Refining Co., the Standard Underground Cable Co. and other industrial concerns struck. Hours, wages and union recognition were involved. The American Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World were both involved and, as usual, fought and quarreled about the details. New York papers of June 18, 1912, announced the practical settlement of the strike on the basis of an increase in pay of about 15 per cent all along the line.

June 12, rioting was begun by the strikers. Two policemen were severe