by the working classes. No self-respecting laborer or mechanic
likes to feel that the man beside him may be a spy from a detective
agency, and especially so when the laboring man is utterly at the mercy
of the detective, who can report whatever he pleases, be it true or
false....[20] Whether assumedly legal or not, the employment of armed
bodies of men for private purposes, either by employers or employees, is
to be deprecated and should not be resorted to. Such use of private
armed men is an assumption of the State's authority by private citizens.
If the State is incapable of protecting citizens in their rights of
person and property, then anarchy is the result, and the original law of
force should neither be approved, encouraged, nor tolerated until all
known legal processes have failed."[21]

We must leave this black page in American history with such comfort as
we can wring from the fact that the modern exponents of the oldest
anarchy have been at least once rebuked, and with the further
satisfaction that the Homestead tragedy brought momentarily to the
attention of the entire nation a practice which even at that time was a
source of great alarm to many serious men. In the great strikes which
occurred in the late eighties and early nineties there was a great deal
of violence, and C. H. Salmons, in his history of "The Burlington
Strike" of 1888, relates how private detectives systematically planned
outrages that destroyed property and how others committed murder. A few
cases were fought out in the courts with results very disconcerting to
the railroads who had hired these private detectives. In the strike on
the New York Central Railroad which occurred in 1890 many detectives
were employed. They were, of course, armed, and, as a result of certain
criminal operations undertaken by them, Congress was asked to consider
the drafting of a bill "to prevent corporations engaged in
interstate-commerce traffic from employing unjustifiably large bodies of
armed men denominated 'detectives,' but clothed with no legal
functions."[22] Roger A. Pryor, then Justice of the Supreme Court of New
York, vigorously protested against these "watchmen." "I mean," he said,
"the enlistment of banded and armed mercenaries under the command of
private detectives on the side of corporations in their conflicts with
employees. The pretext for such an extraordinary measure is the
protection of the corporate property; and surely the power of this gr