It was in this same year that the I. W. W. made its bow to the American public as the militant jail and soap-box belligerent in the free-speech fight. As early as April, 1906, there was a minor clash between the police and the "Wobblies," but it was not until nearly three years later that the I. W. W. free-speech epidemic assumed national proportions. Since 1909 the I. W. W.s have attracted quite as much attention by their dramatic free-speech controversies with municipal authorities here and there as they have by the time-honored resort to the strike. During the next few years after the schism of 1908 these free-speech struggles became rather frequent. The Pacific slope is the most fruitful soil for these conflicts. Labor is more mobile there, and when the organizers in any particular town are arrested for preaching revolution a more effective call to "foot-loose Wobblies" for an "invasion" is possible. On the Pacific slope the "Wobblies" almost literally broke into the jails by hundreds. They came to speak, but with the nearly certain foreknowledge that they would be collared by the police before they said many words. They simply crowded the jails, and in this way, as they intended, clogged the machinery of municipal administration by making themselves the guests of the city in such numbers as to be no inconsiderable burden to their real hosts, the taxpayers. Vincent St. John, then Secretary-Treasurer of the I. W. W., recently told the United States Commission on Industrial Relations that "wherever any local union becomes involved in a free-speech fight they notify the general office and that information is sent to all the local unions, ... with the request that if they have any members that are foot-loose to send them along." Mr. St. John stated, however, that the general (_i. e._, the national) organization does not in any way finance or manage these free-speech fights except to contribute, so far as possible, at the call of the locals. The management of the struggle is in the hands, of the local union or unions most interested.[512] The same tactics are pursued in nearly every instance--a policy of sullen non-resistance on the part of the I. W. W. and of wholesale jailing by the authorities. The trouble always seems to begin because local authorities are revolted by--or at least nervously apprehensive about--either the substance of the I. W. W. speeches or the language in which their ideas are conveyed, or both. The remarks are alleged to be seditious, incendiary, unpatriotic, immoral, _etc._, or, whether they are any or all these or none of them, they are alleged to be profane or vulgar beyond the limits of forbearance. In the judgment of the writer the latter charge can be laid at the door of the I. W. W. with far greater justification than can the former. Refinement is not the Wobblies' long suit. How could it be? Our town fathers ought to be somewhat more tolerant of a want of refinement which is more or less