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Violence and the Labor
Movement
CHAPTER I
THE FATHER OF TERRORISM
"Dante tells us," writes Macaulay, "that he saw, in
encounter between a human form
The enemies, after cruel wounds inflicted,
Malebolge, a strange
and a serpent.
stood for a time glaring on each other. A great cloud
surrounded them, and then a wonderful metamorphosis
began. Each creature was transfigured into the likeness
of its antagonist. The serpent's tail divided into two
legs the man's legs intertwined themselves into a tail.
;
The body of the serpent put forth arms ;
the arms of the
man shrank into his body. At length the serpent stood
up a man, and spake the man sank down a
;
serpent, and
glided hissing away." (i) Something, I suppose, not unlike
this appalling picture of Dante's occurs in the world
whenever a man's soul becomes saturated with hatred.
It will be remembered, for instance, that even Shelley's
all-forgiving and sublime Prometheus was forced by the
torture of the furies to cry out in anguish,
"Whilst I behold such execrable shapes,
Methinks I grow like what I contemplate."
It would not be strange, then, if here and there a man's
entire nature were transfigured when he sees a monster
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