Moreover, what could be more humiliating in a republic than
the fact that a governor who has leased to his friends the military
forces of an entire state should end his term of office unimpeached?
These various phases of the class conflict reveal a distressing state of
industrial and political anarchy, and there can be no question that, if
continued, it has in it the power of making many McNamaras, if not
Bakounins. It will be fortunate, indeed, if there do not arise new
Johann Mosts, and if the United States escapes the general use in time
of that terrible, secretive, and deadly weapon of sabotage. Sabotage is
the arm of the slave or the coward, who dares neither to speak his views
nor to fight an open fight. As someone has said, it may merely mean the
kicking of the master's dog. Yet no one is so cruel as the weak and the
cowardly. And should it ever come about that millions and millions of
men have all other avenues closed to them, there is still left to them
sabotage, assassination, and civil war. These can neither be outlawed
nor even effectively guarded against if there are individuals enough who
are disposed to wield them. And it is not by any means idle speculation
that a country which can sit calmly by and face such evils as are
perpetrated by this vast commerce in violence, by this class use of the
State, and by such monstrous outrages as were committed in Homestead, in
Chicago, and in Colorado, will find one day its composure interrupted by
a working class that has suffered more than human endurance can stand.
The fact is that society--the big body of us--is now menaced by two sets
of anarchists. There are those among the poor and the weak who preach
arson, dynamite, and sabotage. They are the products of conditions such
as existed in Colorado--as Bakounin was the product of the conditions in
Russia. These, after all, are relatively few, and their power is almost
nothing. They are listened to now, but not heeded, because there yet
exist among the people faith in the ultimate victory of peaceable means
and the hope that men and not property will one day rule the State. The
other set of anarchists are those powerful, influential terrorists who
talk hypocritically of their devotion to the State, the law, the
Constitution, and the courts, but who, when the slightest obstacle
stands in the path of their greed, seize from their corrupt tools the
reins of government, in order to rule society with the black-jack and
the "bull pen." The idealist anarchist and even the more practical
syndicalist, preaching openly and frankly that there is nothing left to
the poor but war, are, after all, few in number and weak in action. Yet
how many to-day despair of peaceable methods when they see all these
outrages committed by mercenaries, protected and abetted by the official
State, in the interest of the most sordid anarchism!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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