empty hands. They live only when afforded an opportunity to work, and this opportunity must be procured from the possessors of the mean of subsistence—capital—before their right to live at all or the opportunity to do is possessed. Now, there are 16,200,000 of these people in the United States, according to the census of 1880. Among this number are 9,000,000 men, and reckoning five persons to each family, they represent 45,000,000 of our population. It is claimed that there are between eleven and twelve million voters in the United States. Now, out of these 12,000,000 voters, 9,000,000 are wage workers. The remainder of the 16,200,000 is composed of the women and children employed in the factories, the mines and the various avocations of this country. This class of people—the working class—who alone do all the useful and productive labor of this country are the hirelings and dependants of the propertied class.
Your honor, I have, as a workingman, espoused what I conceive to be the just claims of the working class; I have defended their right to liberty and insisted upon their right to control their own labor and the fruits thereof, and in the statement that I am to make here before this court upon the question why I should not be sentenced, or why I should be permitted to have a new trial, you will also be made to understand why there is a class of men in this country who come to your honor and appeal to you not to grant us a new trial. I believe, sir, that the representatives of that millionaire organization of Chicago, known as the Chicago Citizens' Association stand to a man demanding of your honor our immediate extinction and suppression by an ignominious death. Now, I stand here as one of the people, a common man, a workingman, one of the masses, and I ask you honor to give ear to what I have to say. You stand as a bulwark; you are as a brake between them and us. You are here as the representative of justice, holding the poised scales in your hand. You are expected to look neither to the right nor the left, but to that by which justice, and justice alone, shall be subserved. The conviction of a man, you honor, does not necessarily prove that he is guilty. Your law books are filled with instances where men have been carried to the scaffold and after their death it has been proven that their execution was a judicial murder. Now, what end can be subserved in hurrying this matter through in the manner in which it has been done? Where are the ends of justice subserved, and where is truth found in hurrying seven human beings at the rate of express speed to the scaffold and an ignominious death? Why, if your honor please, the very method of our extermination, the deep damnation of our taking off appeals to your honor's sense of justice, of rectitude, and of honor. A judge may also be an unjust man. Such things have been known. We have, in our histories, heard of Lord Jeffreys. It need not follow that because a man is a judge he is also just. As everyone knows, it has long since become the practice in American politics for the candidates for judgeships, throughout the United States, to be named by corporations and monopoly influences, and it is a well known secret that more than one of our chief justices have been appointed to their seats upon the bench of the United States, Supreme Court at the instance of the leading railway magnates of America—the Huntingtons and Jay Goulds. Therefore the people are beginning to lose confidence in some of our courts of law.
