With still more severity W. J. Ghent says in the Socialist National Organ: "To preach violence and sabotage to the working class is to preach not a working-class morality, not a socialist morality, but a slave morality. It is the morality of Roman slaves in the days of the empire. By lying, deceit, craft, and theft they sought to lessen the evils of their lot. They did not heroically strive for emancipation. They acquiesced in and compromised with slavery, and sought in cowardly ways only to mitigate its evils. They did not, in any general sense, mend their lot. The shrewd and adroit slave sometimes lightened his own burdens, and sometimes the burdens of a small group. But the slave system as a whole was not affected by this form of resistance—if it may be called by that term. Nor will the tenure of the capitalist system be affected by a like policy."[1]
There are finally collective forms of sabotage very popular against public and legal authorities. The last one of many (Oct. 1, 1912) comes from the general secretary of the I. W. W., calling for help to aid the
- ↑ Mr. Robert Hunter has just quoted Professor Herve (Call, Jan. 10,) as the "most daring and brilliant of all advocates of direct action and sabotage." This Syndicalist wrote of the recent German Socialist Victory as follows: "We have, by means of our internal dissensions, our sterile discussions of personalities, developed a party on the one hand and a general federation of labor on the other, equally stagnant, with equally ridiculous inefficiency, treasuries without money, journals without readers, and have engendered demoralization, skepticism and disgust.
"In truth, I begin to ask myself if with our great phrases of insurrection, direct action, sabotage, and 'chasing the foxes,' we are not, after all, from a revolutionary point of view, but little children beside the Socialist voters of Germany."
