Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/462

 448 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

city was forbidden to the strikers by a police manifesto. (Our police have, or at least they assume in such matters, competence of which in the free West there can be no conception.) Similar occurrences have taken place elsewhere during minor strikes. In case this was not possible, the strikers' patrols were summa- rily arrested, and accused of serious disorder [groben Unfiigs) . It should be said that we have in our criminal statutes the beautiful provision (sec. 360, 11) that a fine up to 150 marks, or arrest, shall be the penalty in case one "in an improper way makes a disturbing noise or is guilty of serious disorder." This means, of course, in case anybody at night sings in the streets and breaks windows, puts out street lights, tears down or changes signs, paints statues red, or does anything of like nature that might be suggested by transient folly or youthful recklessness ; the sort of thing, in other words, that we have all been more or less guilty of in our student days. There can be no question from the whole connection of the passage, and from the custom- ary use of language, that only such offenses are meant by the words "serious disorder." Now, however, this expression is coming to be interpreted by our courts in a constantly wider sense. One may commit "serious disorder" by an article in the newspaper which rouses somebody's anger ; by a speech which somebody interprets as offensive to himself ; and also by standing as a sentinel upon the street near a workshop or at a railroad station and thereby becoming an inconvenience to employers. Under this serious-disorder paragraph hundreds of laborers have been punished with arrest in recent years. But this punishment is not sufficient to satisfy the employing classes. Not with arrest, but with house of correction, that is, with the ignominious punishment of the vulgar criminal, should it be punished, if any- one in future in the case of a strike acts as a sentinel or induces another to do so. Yet it is by no means beyond all doubt that actually patrolling as a sentinel can properly be included under the phrase " serious disorder." With very notable frankness the employers' association of Hamburg, one of the most arbitrary capitalistic organizations in the country, declared recently in a public manifesto that it would be better to forbid strikers'