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282 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
doned criminals, who, for certain prices, will undertake
to execute any crime. If one can afford it, one may have
always at hand a body of highwaymen or a small private
army. Such a commerce as this was no doubt necessary
and proper in the Middle Ages and would no doubt be
necessary and proper in a state of anarchy, but when
individuals are allowed to employ private police, armies,
thugs, and assassins in a country which possesses a regularly
established State, courts, laws, military forces, and
police the traffic constitutes a menace as alarming as the
Black Hand, the Camorra, or the Mafia. The story of
these hired terrorists and of this ancient anarchy revived
surpasses in cold-blooded criminality any other thing
known in modern history. That rich and powerful
patrons should be allowed to purchase in the market poor
and desperate criminals eager to commit any crime on
the calendar for a few dollars, is one of the most amazing
and incredible anachronisms of a too self-complaisant
Republic.
For some reason not wholly
obscure the American
people generally have been kept in such ignorance of
the facts of this commerce that few even dream that
it exists. And I am fully conscious of the need for proof
in support of what to many must appear to be unwarranted
assertions. Indeed, it is rare to find anyone who
suspects the character of the private
detective. The
general impression seems to be that he performs a very
useful and necessary service, that the profession is an
honorable one, and that the mass of detectives have only
one ambition in life, and that is to ferret out the criminal
and to bring him to justice. To denounce detectives
as a class appears to most persons as absurdly unreasonable.
To speak of them with contempt is to convey the
impression
that detectives stand
in the way of some evil