Untitled

n8
VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
Berlin, who announced that he was prepared to teach the
manufacture of explosives, for 'the parliamentary way
is too slow.' " (25)
Here certainly is a great source of violence and crime,
and, in view of such revelations, no one can be sure that
any anarchist outrage is wholly voluntary and altogether
free from the manipulation of the secret police. With
agents provocateurs swarming over the movement and
working upon the minds of the weak, the susceptible, and
the criminal, there is reason to believe that their influence
in the tragedies of terrorism is far greater than
will ever be known. To discredit starving men on strike,
to defeat socialists in an election, to promote a political
intrigue, to throw the entire legislature into the hands of
the reaction, to conceal corruption, or to take the public
mind from too intently watching the nefarious schemes
of a political-financial conspiracy
— for all these and a
multitude of other purposes thousands of secret police
agents are at work. The sordid facts of this infamous
commerce are no longer in doubt, and one wonders how
the anarchists can delude themselves into the belief that
they are serving the weak and lowly when they commit
exactly the same crimes that professional assassins are
hired to commit. This certainly is madness. To be thus
used by their bitterest enemies, the police and the State,
to serve thus voluntarily the forces of intrigue, of re-
— action, and of tyranny surely nothing can be so near to
unreason as this. When Bismarck's personal organ declared
again and again, "There is nothing left to be done
but to provoke the social democrats to commit acts of
despair, to draw them out into the open street, and there
to shoot them down," (26) a reasoning opponent would
have seen that this was just what he would not allow
himself to be drawn into. Yet Bismarck hardly says