4. In the establishing of such control of fields of labor some force
is employed in order to bar from the fields men who would gladly enter
them. "Slugging" is a frequent part of the strategy used when strikes
are pending, and this elastic term covers a wide range of deterrent
arguments. Whatever goes beyond a verbal demand or insult to the man
or his family and involves any use of physical force is included in
the meaning of the term, and the action ranges from small injuries to
the clubbings which maim and kill. Moreover, social ostracism is to
be rated as tantamount to force as a means of preventing a free
movement of labor.

5. When the resort to force is defended, it is on the ground that the
organized laborers have a right of tenure of their positions and that
they may vacate them and still hold them as quasi-property. One man
should not "take another man's job" even after the other man has left
it. Acting on this claim, union laborers treat men who attempt to
occupy the vacated places much as a man would treat intruders on his
land or in his house. It is, as is claimed, a case in which a man must
be his own policeman and protect his property.

6. The public sympathizes with the worker's dread of the competition
which he encounters when unemployed men are gathered from near and far
and set working in strikers' positions. It even tolerates, in a way,
his claim of quasi-ownership of his position, and though it condemns
the violence with which he enforces the claim, it does not summarily
repress the violence. It is without a well-defined policy and often
weakly permits disorders to grow into anarchy which only troops can
quell. Local governments are often reluctant to lay vigorous hands on
"sluggers," even when to do so would forestall the necessity for
severer measures. This is due to an instinctive feeling that hardship
and injustice may result from allowing employers to utilize a reserve
of idle labor as a means of depressing their employees' wages and
defeating strikes.

7. It is realized, on the other hand, that giving to violence a free
rein means an amount of anarchy which no state can tolerate, that
non-union laborers have, under the law, a claim to protection, and
that allowing strikers to drive them from the field is permitting a
monopoly to be established by crime.

8. The reluctance promptly to repress violence, on the one hand, or to
leave it unopposed, on the other, expresses a mental wavering, sinc