now it remains for us to cure the disease." What does this mean, your honor? Why, that we are an effect; Mayor Harrison says we are an effect. Now it is a funny doctor that would go to work to cure the effect of a disease. You would never get rid of the disease, would you? You never would touch the cause. The mayor of the city of Chicago says we are the effect. I submit this here as an extenuating circumstance, and as a part of my plea for a new trial. The mayor said: "There is a wide discontent among the working people—there is no doubt about that; it cannot be cured with bullets or policemen's clubs. We have got to remove the cause. That is the task that is before the thinking men, the law makers, today. There is no doubt but that the working people have reason to be discontented all over the country. Legislation in the interest of the big corporations and the monopolies is the fact, and no law making for the laboring classes. That is what makes the laboring man discontented. You must change all that, and legislators must be elected who cannot be bought by the corporations, or what will happen? The people will rise up in mobs, some day, and will have to be subdued with the bullet, and that would be the end of free government." Why, your honor, that is precisely what I have said a hundred, and perhaps a thousand times. That is all I have ever said—go and fetch Harrison—bring him here. He is as much legally guilty on those words as I am this afternoon. I offer that as showing that there are extenuating circumstances, even though we be guilty as charged, which we deny. Mayor Harrison says there is "wide discontent among the working people which cannot be cured with bullets and policemen's clubs." Now, I want to ask this court if it thinks that that discontent can be cured by hanging us?
Take the governor of this State—Governor Oglesby. He made a speech not long ago on monopoly. He said that we stood upon a social volcano. What did he mean? If he had made that remark at the Haymarket he would be in this box here today, and turned over to the hangman. If he happened to be at the Haymarket meeting and made that remark—if there had been a conjunction of circumstances which would have brought him to the Haymarket, such would have been his fate.
None of the men were ever arrested before, not one of us; and I never was arrested. I came to the court of my own accord. The other seven were never arrested before, never were drunk, never were disorderly. Sober, steady, industrious, intelligent, upright, honorable, decent workingmen; there is not a spot, a blemish, nor a single stain against any one of the eight.
Now as to this Gilmer and Burnett matter. I, as a man here on trial wishing to know what your decision is to be with reference to my having a chance to prove my innocence, being convicted upon the testimony of a man like Gilmer, offered the man Burnett as an offset to Gilmer. He was unimpeached. No one questioned his veracity. He stood here as an honest man. Gilmer did not. The State's attorney, in his eagerness to produce this result—and, by the way, right here I want to say, it is no particular credit for the prosecution to bring about this verdict. All the rules of evidence and procedure were reversed on this trial. Instead of being considered innocent until our guilt was established, we have been held guilty unless we could establish our innocence. Why, the whole capitalistic press, the whole of the police,
