any trouble." The testimony as to the character of the meeting shows that it became more quiet during the delivery of Fielden's speech. Where was the danger then that justified the marching of 200 armed police upon it? If I had said something that should not have been said—something that was an incitement to riot, there was still no necessity of these policemen provoking a riot that night, because there was no indication that there was going to be trouble. It has never been claimed by the prosecution that we had anything to do with what they had heard as to the possible blowing up of the freight house. They could have let the meeting disperse peaceably, of its own volition, and they could have come to my house and arrested me for that incendiary language, if it had been such. There was no necessity for provoking a collision that night, because the meeting has been proven overwhelmingly to have been a peaceful meeting up to the close, and I claim that the language, reasonably interpreted, was not necessarily incendiary. A newspaper of this city is discussing the coal monopoly, as it is called—perhaps that is incendiary language. The constitution of the United States has never clearly defined what incendiary language is, that I know of. If it had I should have informed myself of what it was, and tried to keep myself within the bounds.
A recess was taken until two o'clock.
Upon the reconvening of the court in the afternoon, Mr. Fielden continued his speech.
Your honor: When we adjourned for dinner I was speaking to you about my version of the meeting, of the language used at the Haymarket on May 4. I was speaking to you about the character of that meeting and the unjustifiable interruption of it. I was trying to point out to you and show you by the evidence that it was a peaceable meeting; that there was no indication in the demeanor of the crowd of a desire to commit any act which would make them liable to arrest and punishment. I was giving you my version of the sentence, "Throttle the law." I told you that it was a deduction based upon an assumption, and, in my opinion was a logical deduction, that if laws are enacted for the community, which cannot benefit one class in that community, it is the interest of that class that the law's should be abolished and the law-making machines discontinued. I ought to know, myself, what I meant. Your honor has put an interpretation on the expression, "throttle the law," that it meant to kill the police because they were the servants of the law; and that throttling the law could not mean what I said in its literal sense, it being an intangible thing to do. Now, in the light of the principles that have been sworn to on this stand by witnesses for the State, I say in the definition which Parsons gave of the intentions and objects of the Socialists, in addressing the meeting at the Haymarket, it was not the intention of that organization to take any man's life; that it w'as merely the system that made such men possible that we are aiming at. When we consider that it has been proven by witnesses on both sides that that was the object of the organization to which Mr. Parsons and I belonged, will not the words, "throttle the law," bear another interpretation, and a more plausible one? The law is an institution; the policemen are a necessary part of it. It is the doing away with the institution, not the policeman—and I defy anyone to prove that, on a fair inter-
