This is near akin to something far more widely practiced. For railway employees to submit an exact obedience to every rule imder which they work, is to create instant havoc on that road. A train is not started on schedule tick while two or three old ladies are in the act of climbing onto the car. There has always to be the "margin of discretion" in applying rules. French and Italian Syndicalists brought utmost confusion to the railroads by their "conspiracy of literal obedience." It is one of the French phrases, "Study the time, the condition of trade, the technique of the machinery. Wherever you find the most sensitive nerve—attack it with acute refinement." In a French restaurant an objectionable employer was driven half insane on finding that his waiters were serving guests, as publicly advertised, "with perfectly fresh foods." They were practicing sabotage by dropping out all the traditional ingenuities through which half-spoiled material could be given artistic satisfaction to the eater. The cutters in a tailors' strike won their contest by preparing garments up to the standard promised by the proprietor, but with a finished excellence which left him with a deficit.
In Bordeaux gas works, scabs were kept from the establishment by the strikers' following the contract and remaining at their posts, but doing their work so as to shower the managers with public complaint.
If the resources of sabotage are made a study; if all its possibilities are investigated and the results turned into suggestive material for general use, it may become a rare and exciting sport. It is as easy on the farm as
