"The testimony leading up to Mr. Hillquit's admissions was given after Martin Conboy of counsel for the Judiciary Committee had read into the record a speech and a signed article by Victor L. Berger. In the speech, delivered at the Socialist National Convention in 1908, Mr. Berger said: "'I have no doubt that in the last analysis we must shoot, and when it comes to shooting, Wisconsin will be there.' "In the signed article which appeared in a Socialist newspaper published in Milwaukee the following year, he wrote: "'Socialists and workingmen should ... have rifles and the necessary rounds of ammunition ... and be prepared to back up their ballots with their bullets.'"
In reply, according to the "New York Times" of February 20, 1920, putting his own far-fetched construction on Victor L. Berger's words, Morris Hillquit himself advanced the doctrine of "a little shooting" in the following statement:
"'History ... has shown that when the privileged minority is about to lose its privileges ... it tries to destroy reform or lawful revolutionary movements by force, ... and in a case of this kind it may come to shooting. "'It is not at all impossible that, even in this country, when the majority of the people will be ready to introduce substantial reform and take away the privileges of the profiteering class by constitutional, legal methods, these self-same profiteering interests will take offense and try to play some trick upon the people, and in that case it is possible--as a matter of prophecy, not as a matter of program, so far as we are concerned--that the people of this country will be compelled to supplement their political action by a little shooting.'"