methods used, constituted a variety of violations of civil rights; but as the Mollies often used violence themselves, the whole record is dubious. No details need be given.³

The great railroad strikes of 1877 called “The Great Riots” were uprisings of jobless and hungry men who burned and plundered. They demanded no rights; they wanted bread and work. They were suppressed by State and federal troops. The methods, used at this time for punishing those accused of inciting the riots, the appearance of newspaper distortions of the worker's struggles and the bitterness everywhere aroused by this volcanic outburst, all laid the foundations for further trouble.⁴ These riots roughly marked the dividing line between the previous peaceful semi-agricultural civilization which was passing and the complex industrial era of today.

VIOLENCE BY THE WORKERS

The only attack on civil rights of others by the workers has been through violence. The have not had power to deny liberty to others by other means. Their violence has been almost entirely directed against strike-breakers, occasionally against the property of employers. This violence is due partly to the instinctive reactions of determined men; partly to the bitterness of the industrial struggle, and partly to the Civil War and the weakened public morale which followed it. After the War, violence was the resort of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, of the private coal and iron police against the Molly Maguires in the East, and of the Vigilantes and “citizens' committees” in the West. The philosophy of the Anarchist in the labor movement encouraged the workers' resort to violence.

The workers, of course, have used violence extensively, though usually only to meet the violence of the employer or to intimidate the strike-breaker. The extent of such violence can not even be estimated. But even when we admit its outrages the total amount is greatly exaggerated. The large majority of such cases of violence have been intimidation and