armed and
ready for battle. Everywhere syndicalism was heralded as an entirely new
philosophy. Nothing like it had ever been known before in the world.
Multitudes rushed to greet it as a kind of new revelation, while other
multitudes instinctively looked upon it with suspicion as something that
promised once more to introduce dissension into the world of labor.

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,