III.
THE SOCIALISTIC POISON.
Meanwhile, below the thin and treacherous surface, the volcanic fires of a socialistic agitation were blazing up with daily increasing fierceness. The failure of work to laboring men; the widespread and intense suffering consequent thereupon; the conviction that this was not due to any lack of zeal or industry on their part, but to the unequal workings of an artificial and false social order; the growing belief that poverty had become a bar to civil rights, even in the courts, and that wealth had become a sufficient protector of injustice and crime,—all these things combined to add an irresistible weight in the minds of thousands of the less discriminating among the laboring class, especially those of foreign birth, to the arguments and appeals of the socialistic leaders in behalf of a complete overturn,—a “revolution.”
Some of these socialistic apostles were simply theorists who could not comprehend why their lofty ideals were in any way impracticable. Others were fanatics,—honest, zealous, earnest, and illogical as fanatics have always been. Others were really maniacs, whom a long life spent under the oppression and tyranny of foreign monarchies had driven into a fierce and virulent hatred of all government and all order. Others were men who would have been unwilling to earn their daily bread by honest industry, had the means been placed at their hands, but who foresaw in great popular disturbances possibilities for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. All worked harmoniously, however, in the common direction of social anarchy. They had utterly unlike conceptions of the new order which ought to be established on the ruins of the old, but they were united in the one conviction that the old must be wholly demolished before the task of reconstruction could be properly begun. And so idealists of noble but impracticable aspirations, and brawling fanatics, and beery mountebanks, and maniacs ambitious for unbridled and orderless anarchy, though perhaps not on speaking terms with each other personally, worked together for one common end, and that end revolution and destruction.
The vigorous measures which had been taken by all the nations of Europe between 1885 and 1887 to clear their own borders of these revolutionists had been effectual in driving hundreds of thousands of them to America. They brought with them their theories, their fanaticism, their fierce hatred of all orderly society. Belonging for the most part themselves to the working-class, they mingled freely with the discontented and suffering workmen whom they found already too numerous in the land for the work which was offered either to labor or to skill. Everywhere they spread the infection of their destructive theories. Socialistic organizations sprang up, under one name or another, in almost every city and town and village. Beginning with the Hocking Valley riots in 1884–1885, and, like those disturbances, in constantly closer alliance with the trades-unions, these socialistic societies caused numerous local outbreaks in the districts where workmen were most numerous and work hardest to obtain. Pittsburg, Wheeling, and Fall River suffered especial loss in these riots.
So early as the winter of 1884–1885 it was estimated that in New York city alone eighty-five thousand would-be industrious workmen lay idle, in addition to other thousands never estimated, because outside the pale of any possible census-taking, who would not have worked had the opportunity been offered them. A little more than a year later it was freely asserted among the socialists of the country that twice this number were enrolled in their organizations within a radius of ten miles from the New York city hall. In the outbreaks which occurred at other places the officers to whom was committed the task of restoring order generally found themselves opposed most vindictively by men who, a few years before, would have been regarded as the “bone and sinew” of the land. It was noted, too, that these men were always the last to yield to force; that they were always the most sullen and revengeful when finally compelled to do so; and that, even when convicted and undergoing imprisonment, they never showed repentance or sorrow except for failure, constantly boasted of their determination to “try it over again,” and steadily adhered to the belief they would ultimately triumph.