Page:The web (1919).djvu/143

 The Department of Justice could not find handcuffs enough in the city of Chicago to accommodate all the prisoners on that train!

The total time covered by these I. W. W. sentences amounts to eight hundred and seven years and twenty days. The world is deprived of that much-too-independent work in a time when the world needs honest labor. Haywood's boast that there are 100,000 uncaught and unrepentant I. W. W.'s in the United States alone is all the proof needed of the nature of the men thus put away.

These men, like most under-cover criminals, were cowards. Haywood's face went white when he heard sentence passed on him. The prisoners, but lately sneering and arrogant, now sat overwhelmed. Their friends and adherents also were stunned. The court room was filled with armed U. S. Marshals and A. P. L. men, all unknown and all ready for trouble. There was no trouble. Dead silence was in the room. All bail was cancelled, of course, and the march to jail began.

What did the Government prove against the I. W. W.'s? That they had been guilty of almost everything a depraved mind could invent in the way of crime. The public is already conversant with the argot of the band. The "sab cat," or worker of sabotage—secret destruction of property—was a title of pride among them. "Wobblies," "high jacks," "scissor-bills," "bundle-stiffs"—all were part of the personnel put in evidence. A "clock" was divulged to mean a phosphorus bomb, intended to be fired by the sun and set a wheat stack ablaze.

These men spiked a great many spruce trees so that mill saws were ruined on the logs. They killed vineyards in California, and claimed to have burned $2,000,000 worth of wheat in that state alone. They not only burned wheat in the stack, but sowed spikes to damage reapers. They dropped matches and bits of metal in threshing machines. They put emery in delicate machine bearings. In canning factories they mixed the labels, so that grades were vitiated for the vegetables sent out. They polluted or poisoned canned goods with dead rats and the like in factories where they worked. No doubt also they set forest fires, and beyond doubt caused explosions that destroyed hundreds