Every plan they made was known. Every undertaking
proved abortive, because the police knew everything in advance and
frequently had in charge of every plot their own men. Criminals were
turned into the movement under the surveillance of the police.[P] All
through the days of the International it was a common occurrence to
expose police spies, and in every national party agents of the police
have been discovered and driven out. It has become almost a rule, in
certain sections of the socialist and labor movements, that the man who
advocates violence must be watched, and there are numerous instances
where such men have been proved to be paid agents of the police. Joseph
Peukert was for many years one of the foremost leaders of the
anarchists. He was in Vienna with Stellmacher and Kammerer, and devoted
much of his time to translating into German the works of foreign
anarchists. It was only discovered toward the end of his life that
during all this time he was in the employ of the Austrian police.

These and similar startling facts were brought out by August Bebel in an
address delivered in Berlin, November 2, 1898. Luccheni had just
murdered the Empress of Austria, and the German reactionaries attempted,
of course, to connect him with the socialists. Bebel created utter
consternation in their camp when, as a part of his address, he showed
the active participation of high officials in crimes of the anarchists.
"And how often," said Bebel, "police agents have helped along in the
attempted or executed assassinations of the last decades. When Bismarck
was Federal Ambassador at Frankfort-on-the-Main he wrote to his wife:
'For lack of material the police agents lie and exaggerate in a most
inexcusable manner.' These agents are engaged to discover contemplated
assassinations. Under these circumstances, the bad fellows among them
... come easily to the idea: 'If other people don't commit
assassinations, then we ourselves must help the thing along.' For, if
they cannot report that there is something doing, they will be
considered superfluous, and, of course, they don't want that to happen.
So they 'help the thing along' by 'correcting luck,' as the French
proverb puts it. Or they play politics on their own score.

"To demonstrate this I need only to remind you of the 'reminiscences' of
Andrieux, the former Chief of Police of Paris, in which he brags with
the greatest cynicism of how he, by aid of police funds, subsidized
extreme An