For the first time, town after town, like Lawrence, Pittsburg and Little Falls learns with disgust, like the Turks, that it must act with reference to the enveloping life of which it is an integral and living part. Good citizens must not begin by themselves playing the anarchist. In the last year several communities have been robustly acting the anarchist rôle.
The most fundamental of all anarchies is the practical contempt for laws of our own making. Yet several of these centers have been under provocation so acute as to excite sympathetic understanding. In other Western towns, I saw I. W. W. behavior of so galling a nature, that no community known to me in the United States would have borne itself with dignity or perfect law-abidingness.
There is a line in Virgil which runs:
If I cannot bend the powers above,
I will rouse Hell.
The more bumptious of those raiding these towns had not even called upon the "powers above." They were very open in their declaration that "to raise hell" was one of their hearts' desires. It is true, that friends of theirs had been roughly and illegally handled. This was their excuse. The authorities said they feared trouble and for this reason acted as those who deal with a "situation rather than with a theory."
A social conflict has arisen among us between a "situation" and a "theory." Whatever our accepted "law and order" may mean, it is challenged by the socialist movement as a whole and very sharply challenged by a growing revolutionary section known as
