Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/167

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
SABOTAGE
155

suffering strikers in Little Falls, N. Y. The local jail is already well-filled, but this leading official of the order asks that it be straightway so choked that another prison must be built. He does not ask his own membership for anything so commonplace as money, but urges all who can, to journey thither for the sake of being jailed. As they said in Fresno, California, "The town won't mind a dozen or two in jail, but if they have to provide for several hundred of us, they'll get sick." Mr. St. John wants to make town authorities in Little Falls sick by overloading and tiring out every protective and legal agency.

This is the round-about method by sabotage of discouraging and discrediting our present social mechanism. It is evenly on par with putting castor oil in bread, sifting sand into delicate machinery, or laming the horses of scab teamsters by setting the shoe on the hoof so that the nail reaches the soft part of the foot.

Precisely this is what the general secretary asks for the still more delicate machinery of society. It is to be clogged and rendered useless. A mill foreman told me he found the I. W. W. in one of his rooms using the knee against the parts of a machine which he said was "delicate as a baby." "It ruined the product for an entire day because the damage could not be seen till the next morning." "It was so easily done," he said, "that I never could prove to others that any one man did it." "Any one of them could spoil thirty dollars' worth of product in two seconds," was his estimate.

This direct annihilation of property was not more thorough than filling jails in twenty different towns