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204 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
ceed in winning the confidence of the masses, they were
able to awaken suspicion and distrust that demoralized
the movement. The socialists were assailed as traitors
to the cause of labor, because they were preaching peaceable
methods. They were accused of alliances with other
parties, because they sought to elect men to parliament.
They were denounced as in league with the Government
and even the police, because they disapproved of dynamite.
On the other hand, the socialists were equally bitter
in their attacks upon the anarchists. They denounced
their methods as suicidal and the Propaganda of the
Deed as utter madness. In La Periode Tragique, when
Duval, Decamps, Ravachol, and the other anarchists in
France were committing the most astounding crimes,
Jules Guesde and other socialist leaders condemned these
outrages and protested against being associated in the
public mind with those who advocated theft and murder
as a method of propaganda. Indeed, the anarchists in
the late seventies and in the eighties lost many who had
been formerly friendly to them. Guesde and Plechanoff,
both of whom had been influenced in their early days
by the Bakouninists, had broken with them completely.
Later Paul Brousse and Andrea Costa left them. And,
in
fact, the anarchists were now incapable of any effective
action or even education. Without committees, executives,
laws, votes, or chairmen, they could not undertake
any work which depended on organized effort, and,
except as they managed from time to time to gain a
prominent position in some labor or radical organization
built up by others, they had no influence over any large
They were fighting desperately to pre-
body of people.
vent extinction, and in their struggle a number of extraordinarily
brilliant and daring characters came to the