character of the new movement and its advocacy here of the violent
methods employed by the revolutionary section of the French unions. The
most forceful and active spokesman of these methods was Mr. William D.
Haywood, and, largely as a result of his agitation, _la greve generale_
and _le sabotage_ became the subjects of the hour in labor and socialist
circles. In 1911 Mr. Haywood and Mr. Frank Bohn published a booklet,
entitled _Industrial Socialism_, in which they urged that the worker
should "use any weapon which will win his fight."[A] They declared that,
as "the present laws of property are made by and for the capitalists,
the workers should not hesitate to break them."[B]

The advocacy of such doctrines alarmed the older socialists, who were
familiar with the many disasters that had overtaken the labor movement
in its earlier days, and nearly all of them assailed the direct
actionists. Mr. Eugene V. Debs, Mr. Victor L. Berger, Mr. John Spargo,
Mr. Morris Hillquit, and many others, less well known, combated "the new
methods" in vigorous language. Mr. Hillquit dealt with the question in a
manner that immediately awakened the attention of every active
socialist. Condemning without reserve every resort to lawbreaking and
violence, and insisting that both were "ethically unjustifiable and
tactically suicidal," Mr. Hillquit pointed out that whenever any group
or section of the labor movement "has embarked upon a policy of
'breaking the law' or using 'any weapons which will win the fight,'
whether such policy was styled 'terrorism,' 'propaganda of the deed,'
'direct action,' 'sabotage,' or 'anarchism,' it has invariably served to
demoralize and destroy the movement, by attracting to it professional
criminals, infesting it with spies, leading the workers to needless and
senseless slaughter, and ultimately engendering a spirit of disgust and
reaction. It was this advocacy of 'lawbreaking' which Marx and Engels
fought so severely in the International and which finally led to the
disruption of the first great international parliament of labor, and the
socialist party of every country in the civilized world has since
uniformly and emphatically rejected that policy."[C]

There could be no better introduction to the present volume than these
words of Mr. Hillquit, and it will, I think, be clear to the reader that
the history of the labor movement during the last half-century fully
sustains Mr. Hillquit's position. The problem o