From a citizen in lower California, I heard the defense of the "best men in San Diego." He was himself a prosperous man, of college training and of unusual public spirit; but the I. W. W. were "rats carrying a disease and were to be treated as such." They were to be treated as such "law or no law." "We could not," he said, "defend ourselves legally, and were morally justified in taking the law into our own hands." A college professor who was with me, tried to argue with him, saying, "But you, too, are defending the theory and practice of anarchy in its lowest form. You have at your back the whole accumulated machinery of laws and police powers that have been built up for the very purpose of putting an ordered and impersonal justice in the place of the old private codes. At the first strain, you fly to the old barbarisms." The gentleman was as unruffled as if a child had upbraided him. Through and behind his calm exterior one saw in darkened outlines too many probable conflicts between the anarchy of those who have and the anarchy of those who have not.
As far as I can learn, this caustic admonition is even more richly deserved by corresponding citizens in southern lumber camps. There have been dangerous approaches to the same fundamental lawlessness in recent dealing with this movement in many other communities.
It will be said, and rightly said, that this does not excuse a single outrage of I. W. W. origin. It does, however, put us in a frame of mind in which with some intelligent impartiality, we can judge the general spirit of anarchy in our midst. This may guard us from the
