The I. W. W. as an organization began, according to their Secretary and Treasurer, W. H. Haywood, in 1904, in an amalgamation agreed to by officers of the Western Federation of Miners and the American Labor Union. The theory of the band, reduced to its least common denominator, was that of striking terror by secret acts of violence. Their ethics were precisely those of the barnburner, who works in the dark. What was their reason for their acts? None. They all had had their fair chance in America—more than a fair chance. But, because some men had wealth, they thought they also should have, and if it was not offered them free, then they would show their resentment by destroying wealth and injuring those who had it. Their plea was the wish to “aid the laboring man.” God save the mark! They did more to hurt the cause of labor than could have been done in any other way in the world. They stained the name of this republic so black that the most rabid labor unions in Europe protested and disowned them. And they got their reward for that; or at least some of them have, and more will have before the tale is told. Sabotage and strikes were the common methods of the I. W. W. organization, which at the time of the trial numbered over 100,000 members, mostly scattered in the West in many trades. They managed strikes in widely scattered parts of the Union, and as they grew bolder, they planned in war times a general strike of all branches of labor, all over the United States. They first began work among the lumber-jacks, then among the miners. They meant to include all harvest hands in harvest time, all agricultural labor, indeed, labor of every sort. It was the plan to demand a six hour day and $6.00 a day, even for all farm labor; which, as all Americans now carrying the war prices of living can see, would inevitably have raised the price of food unspeakably had it succeeded. When opposed, they wrecked and burned and ruined, maimed, murdered. “Big Bill” Haywood, the I. W. W. leader, execrated “military preparedness.” He called sabotage—that is to say, secret industrial wrecking—the “weapon of the disinterested.” Perhaps in peace times our fatuousness as a people would have caused us to pay small attention even to the series of I. W. W. outrages. We would have absorbed the discomforts and the crimes in our old careless, cowardly way. But now we were at war. We were making ships and airplanes, cannon and small arms and munitions and clothing and equipment. We needed the labor of every loyal man as much as we needed money and soldiers. And it was about this time that Frank H. Little (an I. W. W. leader who was lynched in Butte, Montana, soon after) wrote a letter to the general board of the I. W. W., demanding that the board should take action against the draft law requiring service in the Army.