the states from Michigan westward, worked on this case for months before an arrest was made. There were fifteen lawyers, all of them members of the League, not one of whom got a cent of pay, who worked for a full year helping the Bureau of Investigation to brief the evidence. There you see the A. P. L. in action.
For months and years before the arrests, the Industrial Workers of the World, as they call themselves, had been notorious for their anarchy and violence. Countless acts of ruthlessness had marked their career; millions and perhaps billions in property had been destroyed by them; their leader had been tried for the murder of a governor of a Western state, though acquitted. Nothing lacked in their record of lawlessness and terror, and they were inspired by a Hun-like frightfulness as well as a Hun-like cunning which for a time both excited and baffled the agents of the law in a dozen Western States.
The I. W. W. as an organization began, according to their Secretary and Treasurer, W. H. Haywood, in 1904, in an amalgamation agreed to by officers of the Western Federation of Miners and the American Labor Union. The theory of the band, reduced to its least common denominator, was that of striking terror by secret acts of violence. Their ethics were precisely those of the barn-*burner, who works in the dark. What was their reason for their acts? None. They all had had their fair chance in America—more than a fair chance. But, because some men had wealth, they thought they also should have, and if it was not offered them free, then they would show their resentment by destroying wealth and injuring those who had it. Their plea was the wish to "aid the laboring man." God save the mark! They did more to hurt the cause of labor than could have been done in any other way in the world. They stained the name of this republic so black that the most rabid labor unions in Europe protested and disowned them. And they got their reward for that; or at least some of them have, and more will have before the tale is told.
Sabotage and strikes were the common methods of the I. W. W. organization, which at the time of the trial numbered over 100,000 members, mostly scattered in the West
