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The public does not know, and has no means of guessing that the law on the statute books against “criminal syndicalism” has been modified by the police who enforce it to read “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.” That means that any man may be arrested at any time that any police official does not happen to like the way he has his hair cut, or the red flower in his button-hole. Crime and suspicion of crime are the same thing in our legal procedure, because men once thrown into jail are held there “incommunicado” without warrant or charge; they are not permitted to see attorneys, and their friends cannot find out what has become of them. They are starved and beaten and tortured in jail; so there is no longer any difference between innocence and guilt. The eighty convicted in the state’s prison suffer less than the many hundreds of unconvicted in jails and police stations all over the state.

What this means is that the Black Hand is trying to smash industrial unionism. They have got the old-line unions cowed; they have purchased or frightened most of the leaders, and driven them out of politics, and are no longer afraid of them. But now comes the new movement, the mass union, the portent of the New Day. They are fighting this as furiously as the Spanish Inquisition ever fought against heresy; but to their bewilderment and dismay they are repeating the age-old experience of the torturer and the despot—the blood of the martyrs is becoming the seed of the church!