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THE OLDEST ANARCHISM 313
often excusable, are the deliberate work of mercenaries,
is, to my mind, open to no question whatever.
Anyone who cares to look up the history
of the labor
movement for the last hundred years will find that in
every great strike private detectives and police agents
have been at work provoking violence. It is almost incredible
what a large number of criminal operations can
be traced to these paid agents. From 181 5 to the present
day the bitterness of nearly every industrial conflict
of importance has been intensified by the work of these
spies, thugs, and provocateurs. "It was not until we
—
became infested by spies, incendiaries, and their dupes
distracting, misleading, and betraying — that physical force
was mentioned among us," says Bam ford, speaking of
the trade-union activity of 1815-1816. "After that our
moral power waned, and what we gained by the accession
of demagogues we lost by their criminal violence and
the estrangement of real friends." (45) Some of the
notable police agents that appear in the history of labor
are Powell, Mitchell, Legg. Stieber, Greif, Fleury, Baron
von Ungern-Sternberg, Schroeder-Brennwald, Krueger,
Kaufmann, Peukert, Ilaupt, Von Ehrenberg, Friedeman,
Weiss, Schmidt, and Ihring-AIahlow. In addition we
find Andre, Andrieux, Pourbaix, Melville, and scores
of other high police officials directing the work of these
agents. In America, McPartland, Schaack, and Orchard
— to mention the most notorious only
— have played infamous
roles in provoking others, or in undertaking themselves,
to commit outrages. There were and are, of
course, thousands of others besides those mentioned,
but these are historic characters, who planned and executed
the most dastardly deeds in order to discredit the
trade-union and socialist movements. The space here is
too limited to go into the historic details of this com-