In order that you may properly understand this situation, and the things that led up to it, the motives underlying it, the manner in which it was planned and executed, I want to go just a little way back of the occurrence on November 11th, and state to you in rough outline the situation that existed in Centralia, the objects that were involved in this case, the things each are trying to accomplish and the way each went about it.  There has been some effort on the part of the state to make it appear it is not an I.W.W. trial.  I felt throughout that the I.W.W. issue must come into this case, and now that they have made their opening statement, I say unreservedly it is here in this case, not because we want to drag it in here, but because it can’t be left out.  To conceal from you gentlemen that it is an I.W.W. issue would be merely to conceal the truth from you and we, on our part, don’t want to do that now or at any time hereafter.

The I.W.W. is at the bottom of this.  Not as an aggressor, however.  It is a labor organization, organized in Chicago in 1905, and it is because of the philosophy for which it stands and because of certain tactics which it evolves that this thing arose.

[Illustration:  James McInerney

Logger.  Born in County Claire, Ireland.  Joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1916.  Was wounded on the steamer “Verona” when the lumber trust tried to exterminate the union lumberworkers with bullets at Everett, Washington.  McInerney was one of those trapped in the hall.  He surrendered to officers of the law.  While in the city jail his neck was worn raw with a hangman’s rope in an effort to make him “confess” that the loggers and not the mob had started the trouble.  McInerney told them to “go to hell.”  He is Irish and an I.W.W. and proud of being both.]

A Labor Movement on Trial

The I.W.W. is the representative in this country of the labor movement of the rest of the world It is the representative in the United States of the idea that capitalism is wrong:  that no man has a right, moral or otherwise, to exploit his fellow men, the idea that our industrial efforts should be conducted not for the profits of any individual but should be conducted for social service, for social welfare.  So the I.W.W. says first, that the wage system is wrong and that it means to abolish that wage system.  It says that it intends to do this, not by political action, not by balloting, but by organization on the industrial or economical field, precisely as employers, precisely as capital is organized on the basis of the industry, not on the basis of the tool.  The I.W.W. says industrial evolution has progressed to that point there the tool no longer enforces craftsmanship.  In the place of a half dozen or dozen who were employed, each a skilled artisan, employed to do the work, you have a machine process to do that work and it resulted in the organization of the industry on an industrial