Berkman was in a rich field for labor unrest. California is a strong labor state. The whole country, outside as well as inside California, had been excited over the _Los Angeles Times_ bomb affair in 1912, and it revived that excitement when two of the culprits were prosecuted three years later. One finds constant reference to the case in the files of _The Blast_, and to the strikes at Lawrence, Mass., and Ludlow, Colorado, and Youngstown, Ohio. Anti-capitalistic rough-house in any corner of the continent was good copy for Berkman. If it flagged for a moment he took up the cudgels for his friend Emma, who had just been arrested in New York and sentenced to the workhouse for distributing birth-control literature. Or he dove into international relations, comparing in one instance Villa and President Wilson, with little mercy for the latter. The issue of April Fool’s Day, 1916, carried a leading editorial directed against the Pacific Coast Defense League, just organized to bring the national guard of the Pacific and Mountain states into a condition of higher efficiency and to start a program of “healthy physical and military training” in the public schools. This editorial was signed by Tom Mooney, who soon appeared in the columns of the paper in another capacity. The publication did not go unheeded by the Post Office department. On May 1 Berkman burst out with an article headed, “To Hell With The Government,” in which he used language that would make any ordinary head of hair curl up. He was angry because the Government had issued an order holding up all succeeding issues of the paper. In an editorial he said he welcomed the uprising in Ireland--the Easter Day affair in Dublin which cost several Sinn Feiners their lives. Other anarchistic publications in the country were meeting the same fate. _The Alarm_, in Chicago, _Revolt_ of New York, _Regeneracion_, a Mexican revolutionary sheet issued in Los Angeles, and _Voluntad_, a Spanish paper in New York, were closed up. But Berkman went on publishing, and howling about the constitutional freedom of the press. Back in New York other friends of his had been making more trouble: Mrs. Max Eastman and Bolton Hall were arrested for circulating birth-control pamphlets, and Bouck White was jailed for distributing an effigy of the American flag bearing a dollar-mark. Berkman took up their cases and howled. He sent appeals for help in his fight against the Post Office department, and raised a little money. One of his liberal contributors was a writer named John Reed, who sent him five dollars from New York. Then a strike broke out, fostered by the I. W. W., on the iron ranges in Northern Minnesota, and William M. Haywood wrote Berkman an appeal for help which the latter published in _The Blast_ with a eulogy. He found no dearth of subjects to fill his pages, and then suddenly came an interruption.