up posters in which the
deeds of Kammerer and Stellmacher were glorified. He, too, was in the
employ of the German police, as was afterward established during the
court proceedings.

"A certain Schmidt, who had to disappear from Dresden on account of his
crooked conduct, came to Zurich and urged the establishment of a
_special fund for assassinations_, contributing twenty francs to start
the fund. Correspondence which he had carried on with Chief of Police
Weller, of Dresden, and which later fell into our hands, proved that he
was in the employ of the police, whom he kept informed of his actions.
And then the unmasked secret police agent Ihring-Mahlow, here in
Berlin, who announced that he was prepared to teach the manufacture of
explosives, for 'the parliamentary way is too slow.'"[25]

Here certainly is a great source of violence and crime, and, in view of
such revelations, no one can be sure that any anarchist outrage is
wholly voluntary and altogether free from the manipulation of the secret
police. With _agents provocateurs_ swarming over the movement and
working upon the minds of the weak, the susceptible, and the criminal,
there is reason to believe that their influence in the tragedies of
terrorism is far greater than will ever be known. To discredit starving
men on strike, to defeat socialists in an election, to promote a
political intrigue, to throw the entire legislature into the hands of
the reaction, to conceal corruption, or to take the public mind from too
intently watching the nefarious schemes of a political-financial
conspiracy--for all these and a multitude of other purposes thousands of
secret police agents are at work. The sordid facts of this infamous
commerce are no longer in doubt, and one wonders how the anarchists can
delude themselves into the belief that they are serving the weak and
lowly when they commit exactly the same crimes that professional
assassins are hired to commit. This certainly _is_ madness. To be thus
used by their bitterest enemies, the police and the State, to serve thus
voluntarily the forces of intrigue, of reaction, and of tyranny--surely
nothing can be so near to unreason as this. When Bismarck's personal
organ declared again and again, "There is nothing left to be done but to
provoke the social democrats to commit acts of despair, to draw them out
into the open street, and there to shoot them down,"[26] a reasoning
opponent would have seen that this was just what he wo