anarchistic theories, if not with bombs. Their organs had daily published shallow, vapid, frothy, and impertinent defiance to the decrees of the law-courts, with the solid labor class for sympathizers and the freedom of the ballot for their fulcrum in all political agitations. The simple trades-unions of yesterday had already established a crude centralized despotism over the general business of to-day, and were no respecters of the civil rights of employers. The edicts of the monopolist and the "corners" of life's staples, throughout America, were not graver commercial despotisms than the iron-handed, arbitrary, and coercive decrees of the executive boards of the Knights of Labor, who to-day talked platitudes about the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, and to-morrow ordered boycotts and strikes, and the confiscation of the civil right to the daily pursuits of labor and happiness which the Constitution guarantees to all,—even to the "scab,"—thus upsetting, with legal impunity, the calculations of manufacturers and the tariff of prices and destroying business interests in general.
In this view he thought of the following strange utterance: "Now mark my words, for I am speaking with some knowledge of the subject we are dealing with: the time will come when all these several divisions of the labor movement will unite, and we will have one grand reform organization." He reflected that, when this grand organization was ripe for action, the civil liberty, civil rights, political orthodoxy, and capital of the American people would have to contend with an assembly of Brutuses, who would be ignorant enough to believe it as easy for them to shatter the republic as to smash porcelain. He knew that Communism would dart on treasure like a bird of prey; that its elements were hunger, envy, death, and legalized plunder; that idlers were ever willing to contribute their penny to pocket labor's sovereign. He remembered the time when Cæsar or Communism was Rome's only alternative.
His imagination pictured vagabond politicians, the beggars of yesterday; visionary dreamers; men who, having failed in all other business, therefore felt themselves qualified to tinker with the Constitution; the bandits of the slums, idlers, and loafers, assuming important airs; all the representative spirits
