them together, and today they are working only until 7 o'clock in the evening, and no Sunday work. That is a great crime I have committed, in your sight. I saved for the men from four to five hours a day. I have saved the bakers from six to eight hours work a day, and that gives them time for education. We Socialists are great, believers that the laboring men should educate themselves, not to be ignoramuses, as some people express themselves, "as the ignorant Anarchists are." We are great friends of education and a reduction of the hours of labor. A reduction of the hours of labor was my principal aim, and I have done some good work to bring it about.
I have been in the labor movement since 1865. I have seen how the police have trodden on the Constitution of this country, and crushed the labor organizations. I have seen from year to year how they were trodden down, where they were shot down, where they were "driven into their holes like rats," as Mr. Grinnell said to the jury. But they will come out! Remember that within three years before the beginning of the French Revolution, when laws had been stretched like rubber, that the rubber stretched too long, and broke—a result which cost a good many State's attorneys and a good many honorable men their necks.
We Socialists hope such times may never come again; we do everything in our power to prevent it, such as reducing the hours of labor and increasing wages. But you capitalists won't allow this to be done. You use your power to perpetuate a system by which you make your money for yourselves and keep the wage workers poor. You make them ignorant and miserable, and you are responsible for it. You won't let the toilers live a decent life.
We want to educate the masses and keep them back from destroying life and property, but we are not able to hold the masses when starvation brings them out of their holes like rats. I have walked along the streets of this city and I have seen the rats come from their holes by the hundreds in the basements, where men pay five and ten cents for lodgings. I have seen the miserable wretches there in the day begging for a piece of bread, and in the night they lie there in an air that was difficult to breathe. I have been in there at 10, 12, and 2 o'clock at night, and when those "rats" are let out of their holes and get desperate I would not like to be near them. The time will come that you will see them. You rich men don't want the poor educated. You don't want anybody to be educated. You want to keep them down in the mud so you can squeeze the last drop of blood out of their bones.
We asked the capitalists once at a meeting to discuss the question of labor, and Mr. Gary was invited, and each one of them was invited, and nobody appeared. They didn't want to discuss the question; they didn't care for it. What is the next question? No discussion, more galling guns, more militia, and 300 more police. For what? To catch the thieves? I read the daily papers and see that burglaries are taking place all over the city, but I don't see that they catch any. There are some twelve hundred odd policemen in the city of Chicago, and every day so many burglaries. Maybe they need them to make a case sometimes, and they don't arrest them; but when it comes to arresting a poor workingman they are all there. On May 9 when I came home, my wife, who is delicate, told me that the patrol wagon with twenty-five police, came to search my house. I must be a very dangerous
