What is syndicalism? Whence came it and why? The first question has been answered in a hundred books written in the last ten years. In all languages the meaning of this new philosophy of industrial warfare has been made clear. There is hardly a country in the world that has not printed several books on this new movement, and, although the word itself cannot be found in our dictionaries, hardly anyone who reads can have escaped gaining some acquaintance with its purport. The other question, however, has concerned few, and almost no one has traced the origin of syndicalism to that militant group of anarchists whom the French Government had endeavored to annihilate. After the series of tragedies which ended with the murder of Carnot, the French police hunted the anarchists from pillar to post. Their groups were broken up, their papers suppressed, and their leaders kept constantly under the surveillance of police agents. Every man with anarchist sympathies was hounded as an outlaw, and in 1894 they were broken, scattered, and isolated. Scorning all relations with the political groups and indeed excluded from them, as from other sections of the labor movement, by their own tactics, they found themselves almost alone, without the opportunity even of propagating their views. Facing a blank wall, they began then to discuss the necessity of radically changing their tactics, and in that year one of the most militant of them, Emile Pouget, who had been arrested several times for provoking riots, undertook to persuade his associates to enter actively into the trade unions. In his peculiar argot he wrote in _Pere Peinard_: "If there is a group into which the anarchists should thrust themselves, it is evidently the trade union. The coarse vegetables would make an awful howl if the anarchists, whom they imagine they have gagged, should profit by the circumstance to infiltrate themselves in droves into the trade unions and spread their ideas there without any noise or blaring of trumpets."[1] This plea had its effect, and more and more anarchists began to join the trade unions, while their friends, already in the unions, prepared the way for their coming. Pelloutier, a zealous and efficient administrator, had already become the dominant spirit in one entire section of the French labor movement, that of the _Bourses du Travail_. In another section, the carpenter Tortellier, a roving agitator and militant anarchist, had already persuaded a large number of unions to declare for the general strike as the _sole_ effective weapon for revolutionary purposes. Moreover, Guerard, Griffuelhes, and other opponents of political action were preparing the ground in the unions for an open break with the socialists. By 1896 the strength of the anarchists in the trade unions was so great that the French delegates to the international socialist congress at London were divided into two sections: one in sympathy with the views of the anarchists, the other hostile to them.