o have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass
your hand through."

Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If
not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the
American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the
King's coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his
comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.
True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will
have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic
arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action.
It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush
the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man's right
to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert
their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism
would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy,
in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of
English labor unions) direct, revolutionary, economic action has
become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to
make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor's power.
The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic
consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short
time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize
the importance of the solidaric general protest.

Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is
equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred
forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to
them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority
in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct
action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code,
is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social
change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either
not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that
revolution is but thought carried into action.

Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every
phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the
effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social
opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the
spiritual light o