The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-10-16

But 1t is little word which keeps creeping into the daily press over the wires, sending many to the diction aries, but unfortunately so far it
 hasn't found 8 place in the body of
 the text of any of them. and if noted at all it Is in footnote.
 But there is no use blaming the American makers of dictionaries for the omission, for it has not yet found the rights of citizenship in the La- rousse, the standard dictionary of the French, but because 1t is at present waif and being treated as a step- child Is no reason why 1t isn't per- missible to try and get its meaning.
 A score of years ago "sabotage' was sequently had no standing in court, but this, however, did not keep those guilty of committing 1t from being often haled before judges, for sab oters were in as bad repute in the eyes of the law as the term sabotage was in the eyes of the makers of dic- tionaries
 Now anyone with smattering of for shoes in "sabot." Now, Sabotage" as used in France does not find it's full meaning in "to make wooden shoes,' as it might be easily imag- ined but, in a figurative way, it means to work clumsily as if by sabot idea of it's intent one must have lived abroad and seen men, women and chill dren wearing big, heavy. clumsy, shoes. Y can never forget my astonishment on the first morning I went out to the classroom of the private school to find at the door a pile of wooden shoes discarded by the boys who had come in from the outside.
 In 20 years the word sabotage has been transformed from bit of slang into a new form of social warfare, by which those who practice 1t hope to batter down the great iron gate of capitalism and let in the workers to run the economic affairs of the world. It had just come into vogue the year first entered school at Paris, back in 1881. So far as I know it was tho telegraphers who first turned the sab otage trick" The operators of the central office, dissatisfied with the wage scale for night overtime, sent up a petition to the minister of posts and telegraphs, asking for 10 francs in stead of 5, which they were then paid , ~S~.-. q. H fo a. m. After several days of waiting the administration refused to grant the increase asked.
 A strike being impossible they re- sorted to a trick" Paris awoke one bright day to find that so far as telegraphic communication was con
 cerned she was cut off from the prov inces and the rest of the world. (Tele phones had not yet been installed.) After being isolated for four or five days the administration, with engi- neers and numerous squads of fore men and mechanics, invaded the cen- tra1 office to inspect minutely every apparatus, battery, wire, etc, from the top to the bottom, but they could not locate the trouble. They then grant l ed the raise and within an hour all i the lines were open and the world woke up to find out that Paris had not disappeared from the map but that she had been "saboted;'' and from that day to this sabotage" has been a dreadful weapon in the. hands of the workers in France and elsewhere, but up to this good day no one knows how the stelegraphers turned the trick
 l Please remember that I am not now going into the question of whether sabotage" is right. I may take that ] up later. Just at present I am more l interested in the word that ranks in i the public mind easily next to anarchy. l nihilism, syndicalism, a very trinity of woes to plague those who stand 1 for the present order of things in so- 1 ciety. It is needless to say that the quartet of ds named are sufficient l to give the capitalist class many bad dreams.
 l We are told that the first term enl- l bodying sabotage was first used by 1 the Scotch and expressed in their dia-
 lect as Ego cannnie," later to be taken over by the English and reworded as
 Ego slow" which was the workers
 answer to the hard hearted bosses whose whole aim was in speeding up" l the laborers. This however, is sab- | otage in it's mildest form and carries only slight part of the fierce inten- sity which is hid in the term
 l Saboteurs, to use the French word ] or saboters the English equivalent, are
 the scouts in the class struggle; they are the pickets at the outposts, the ] spies in the enemies own ranks. This 1 means that sabotage is dark, invin- cible, terrible Damocles' sword that revolutionary laborites seek to hang over the heads of every employer in l the land.
 1 The aim is for it to be present ev-
 anywhere invisible, like the Zeppelin that scars high above the clouds in the dead of night, beyond the reach of
 the cannon and the searchlight, drop ping bombs into the camps of those
 who are helpless to protect them selves.
 Those who believe in the doctrine | claim that sabotage. even in it's Scotch
 expression of Ego cannie,". or its Eng fish equivalent, Ego slow," is derived from the capitalist conception of hu-
 man labor, which it considers as a l merchandise or commodity.
 I cite this not to agree with the idea expressed but to show another form of the word, for the chief exponent of
 the idea of force says it does mot require to be a great prophet to pre- dict that the more we progress, the more we shall sabot." He goes on to
 point out that there is danger of the
 sabotager getting into jail.
 In some of the literature of the sab-
 oteurs I have read some very de-
 tailed and ingenious ways in which workers in many fields of industry can