t
violence has played, and still in a measure plays, a part in the labor
movement. I mean the violence of sheer desperation. It rises and falls
in direct relation to the lawlessness, the repression, and the tyranny
of the governments. Furthermore, where labor organizations are weakest
and the masses most ignorant and desperate, the very helplessness of the
workers leads them into that violence. This is made clear enough by the
historic fact that in the early days of the modern industrial system
nearly every strike of the unorganized laborers was accompanied by
riots, machine-breaking, and assaults upon men and property.

No small part of this early violence was directly due to the brutal
opposition of society to every form of labor organization. The workers
were fought violently, and they answered violence with violence. It must
not be forgotten that the trade unions and the socialist parties grew,
in spite of every menace, in the very teeth of that which forbade them,
and under the eye of that which sought to destroy them. And, like other
living things in the midst of a hostile environment, they covered
themselves with spurs to ward off the enemy. The early movements of
labor were marked by a sullen, bitter, and destructive spirit; and some
of the much persecuted propagandists of early trade unionism and
socialism thought that "implacable destruction" was preferable to the
tyranny which the workers then suffered. Not the philosophy, but the
rancor of Bakounin, of Nechayeff, and of Most represented,
three-quarters of a century ago, the feeling of great masses of
workingmen. Riots, insurrections, machine-breaking, incendiarism,
pillage, and even murder were then more truly expressive of the attitude
of certain sections of the brutalized poor toward the society which had
disinherited them than most of us to-day realize. In every industrial
center, previous to 1850, the working-class movement, such as it was,
yielded repeatedly to self-exhausting expressions of blind and sullen
rage. The resentment of the workers was deep, and, without program or
philosophy, a spirit of destruction often ran riot in nearly every
movement of the workers.

During the first fifty years, then, of last century, little building was
done. A mob spirit prevailed, and the great body of toilers was divided
into innumerable bands, who fought their battles without aim, and,
after weeks of rioting, left nothing behind them. Toward the middle of
the c