want, and servility on the one hand, and the dangerous accumulation of spoils, idleness, voluptuousness and tyranny on the other. It means the preservation of vice in every form. And last but not least, it means the preservation of the class struggle, of strikes, riots and bloodshed. That is your "order," gentlemen. Yes, and it is worthy of you to be the champions of such an order. You are eminently fitted for that role. You have my compliments!
Grinnell spoke of Victor Hugo. I need not repeat what he said,[1] but will answer him in the language of one of our German philosophers: "Our bourgeoisie erect monuments in honor of the memory of the classics. If they had read them they would burn them!" Why, amongst the articles read here from the Arbeiter-Zeitung, put in evidence by the State, by which they intend to convince the jury of the dangerous character of the accused Anarchists, is an extract from Goethe's Faust,
"Es erben sich Gesetz und Rechte,
Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort," etc.
(Laws and class privileges are transmitted like an hereditary isease.) And Mr. Ingham in his speech told the Christian jurors that our comrades, the Paris Communists, had in 1871, dethroned God, the Almighty, and had put up in his place a low prostitute. The effect was marvelous! The good Christians were shocked. I wish your honor would inform the learned gentlemen that the episode related occurred in Paris nearly a century ago, and that the sacrilegious perpetrators were the cotemporaries of the founders of this Republic—and among them was Thomas Paine. Nor was the woman a prostitute, but a good citoyenne de Paris, who served on that occasion simply as an allegory of the goddess of reason.
Referring to Most's letter, read here, Mr. Ingham said: "They," meaning Most and myself, "they might have destroyed thousands of innocent lives in the Hocking Valley with that dynamite." I have said all I know about the letter on the witness stand, but will add that two years ago I went through the Hocking Valley as a correspondent. While there I saw hundreds of lives in the process of slow destruction, gradual destruction. There was no dynamite, nor were they Anarchists who did that diabolical work. It was the work of a party of highly respectable monopolists, law-abiding citizens, if you please. It is needless to say the murderers were never indicted. The press had little to say, and the State of Ohio assisted them. What a terror it would have created if the victims of this diabolical plot had resented and blown some of those respectable cut throats to atoms! When, in East St. Louis, Jay Gould's hirelings, "the men of grit," shot down in cold blood and killed six inoffensive workingmen and women, there was very little said, and the grand jury refused to indict the gentlemen. It was the same way in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other places. A Chicago furniture manufacturer shot down and seriously wounded two striking workingmen last spring. He was held over to the grand jury. The grand jury refused to indict the gentleman. But when, on one occasion, a workingman in self-defense resisted the murderous attempt of the police and threw a bomb and for once blood flowed on the other side, then a terrific howl went up all over the land: "Conspiracy has attacked
- ↑ He asserted that Victor Hugo's writings (of which be knows no more than the average Chicago policeman) were not revolutionary.
