and cities. I tried once to reckon up the cost of one of these escapades in which nearly 200 men must have lost more than 100,000 days' earnings. There was not a baker's dozen of them who could not have had work in that community, if they had been willing to do it. They took long journeys in freight cars. Some paid their fares. I saw others driven from their hold beneath fast trains, and others I saw dropping off, smeared with dirt, as we slowed into the next station. The incidental public expenditure—lawyers, police, court trials and jails—furnish ugly hints of this colossal waste of values, actual and potential. To multiply this special instance by at least thirty, would give us approximate estimates of the last year's destruction.
I am in this not laying blame alone upon I. W. W. adventurers. Many and deeper causes are behind these adolescent pranks. But this method of sabotage, as practiced by wandering crowds in conflict with local police, is like its other forms of waste. It is purely destructive, as warfare and disease are destructive.
Explicitly the I. W. W. mean it for this purpose. Capitalism, they tell us, can be reached in no other way. One who was conspicuous at Lawrence told me, "Why, the only fright we gave the capitalists was by showing them that we had power to bring their business and their profits to a dead standstill. We taught them this, and at the same time gave an object-lesson to our own side. We had only to point to the empty mills and say,—'Look at your work. You see how helpless they are without you.
