made a determined effort, by violence and intimidation of various sorts to prevent those wishing to resume work from reaching the mills. The endless chain system of picketing was put into force, and women ... who did not work in the mills, along with "strong arm" men, were pressed into service. Women were assaulted by men, and pepper thrown in the eyes of operatives and police officers. Early in the morning powerful men followed, threatened, and seized girls on their way to the mills, twisting their wrists, snatching their luncheons, and terrorizing them generally. During the night strangers visited the homes of the workers and threatened to cut their throats if they persisted in going to work....[566] On the other hand, there is fairly conclusive evidence that the advent of Ettor and Haywood resulted, if not in the entire elimination of violent tactics, at least in their marked reduction and shifting of emphasis to the tactics of passive resistance. According to one who was on the spot, the riots occurred before Ettor's organization was effected, when the strikers gathered about the mills as an organized mob and mill bosses turned streams of water upon them in zero weather. After the "blood-stained anarchists" arrived on the scene, a policy of non-resistance to the aggressions of the police and the militia prevailed.[567] Howsoever passive the strikers may have been in their attitude to the police and the militia, they were probably quite aggressive in their campaign to win recruits to the ranks of the strikers. A Lawrence mill overseer reports that the I. W. W. strike committee[568] did it in this way: The addresses of the men working are given to a committee. They are visited after nine o'clock at night by strangers, generally Poles: "Working today?" "Yah." (The man speaking has a sharp knife and is whittling a stick.) "Work tomorrow?" "I d'no." "If you work tomorrow, I cut your throat." "No, no. I no work." "Shake." And they shake hands.[569] There is strong evidence of at least one attempt on the part of the business and commercial interests of Lawrence to discredit the strikers. In three places in the city a total of twenty-eight sticks of dynamite were found. The strikers declared that it had been "planted." Later a business man of Lawrence, who had no connection with the strikers, was arrested and finally tried and "convicted of conspiracy to injure by the planting of dynamite." He was fined $500.00![570]