 Section 1 de « Selected Works » « Haymarket Speachers » par Volterine Declare. C'est un Recording LibriVox. Toutes les Recording LibriVox sont dans le domaine public. Pour plus d'informations ou de volontaires, s'il vous plaît, visitez LibriVox.org. « The Fruit of a Sacrifice » de Selected Works « Haymarket Speachers » par Volterine Declare. « Eight times has our mother earth, bade her scared breast to the bitter-blossed. Eight times laid-necked. This unhealing wound when blood still issues. This deep gash near her heart wherein they thrust her murdered children bodies, the grave at World Ham. Eight weary years have the women wept and the orphan children placed upon their father's tomb. Their wreaths of tear-wet flowers, eight slumbrous years, has the powerful silence laying upon those lips that living never enclose safe to utter defiance to the turret that strangle but could not subdue. Eight solemn years has the sweet dead voice that filled the gloomy corridors of Cook County jail with the tender song of undying love on the lost night that it ever sang, been echoing over the world. Four beyond the black wall of the prison, born in invisible wings, up high into the garret, and down low into the cellars of the world. Flood the swan song of death till from out of the night of a people sorrow, in near and far off lands, the unknown voices waken and sing. Eight rain-breathsprings have the graves grown green, eight withering autumns turned old and white, and the immortal seed-lain germinating in the thorough. Four you greeners and garries of the world, who for eight blazing years have borne upon your bros the burning brun of kin, for you the earthquake for us liberty. Oh, there are so many things to gather from this grave, upon whose sudden growth the scarlet leaves wheel and scatter, whipped in the November wind, flying in the faces of the thousands gathered there, even as the words of the dead men whirl and scatter, scarlet flaming and lighting blazes in the hearts they touch. What shall we gather comrades, what thought shall we bury away to serve us in another year of struggle, for that goes to us most dear? What is the most priceless lesson we can learn from the martyrdom of porcins, fissures, engels, lynx and spies? For the saddest thing to me, in all these commemorations, is that the most of us only dropped the tears of regret, only say, ah, they took away the best of our comrades, and they are known to fill their places. The idea of incommensurable irreparable loss, the idea that whatever good come from the agitation created, was bought far too dear since a continual pulsation of pain, a hopeless ache in the heart, such as one feels when the clang of a prison gate rings on the ear, and is told that a prisoner for life has gone in there at. Is this pain justified? Is it true that sacrifice is foolish, and martyrdom an uncompensated loss? In the general breaking up of all our former conceptions based upon the theological idea of men and his relations, this is one that calls for an examination. All the history of the race, as we know, has been one long interlaking of sacrifice, not a corner of a populated world, so isolated, not a people so barbarous, not a religion so rude, not a reform so insignificant, but has had its authors, its grand-mères, its savannah rulers, breathing defiance under the mouths of guns, or singing glories from the center of smoke, but at the heart of these exotic triumphs of death, has ever been the idea of a compensating god, who for pain suffered here, will grant reward of this year after. Now modern science has proven that this god does not exist. No way and sky or earth or sea can any trace of him be found, and the confrary telescope, microscope, spectroscopes all enter the protest that cannot be gained said against a belief in the existence of any mythical power, which troubles itself about an individual's life or death, all confirm the utterance of that wise man who said, for what permanence has man above the beast, as a one dithe, so they are the other. Yeah, they have all one breath, from the heights of the stars, we harken to the death of the dead, and know that truly, there is nothing new under the sun. Therefore, the old belief, which sustained the martyrs of the post, the old sanctity of reward, which upheld the sacrifices of the post, plays no part in our view of the tragedy of 11 november. Since God no longer enters in our estimate of a conduct of life, we must either reward sacrifice and martyrdom as acts of individual fully and social waste, or we must find scientific basis to justify them. That is, we must find some reason which will not contradict any well-grounded statement of the processors of nature, or as we commonly say, natural law. Some reason which will warrant a human being involuntarily becoming a handful of senseless issues for the sake of an idea, for the 19th century has produced these men, men who build at no shrine, acknowledge no God, believe in no hereafter, and yet went as proudly and triumphantly to the gallows as other Christian martyrs did of all. It is known that Albert Persons, of his own free will, returned and gave himself up to trial by the court, which sentenced him to death when in fact nothing was easier for him than to have left America till the storm passed. It is not so generally known that even till the last, even on the fatal anniversary night, had he but signed the petition to the governor, his sentence would have been commuted, and today he would have been free. He knew this, knew it to be a certainty, for had he been willing to sign the petition, such a pressure would have been bought to bear upon Augustine, as he could not have refused. When Persons received Captain Black Telegram from Springfield urging him to do it, he placed the telegram upon the table and beside it, the mausages, it was to say, let this answer that, let the all strong song of defiance, that the people have hurled against the rulers, since 93, Bima replied to those who beat me, shoe for my life and the feet of a state, knew I will not petition. Was it an act of folly or heroism, which, filled then shrub and nib or free today, he might have been. Was it folly? Let us see the facts a little further. He knew that he could be saved, but his comrades, Ling, Fisher, Engel and Spice could not. They knew it to, yet knowing it, they said, nevertheless we will sign if Persons will. We are willing to record ourselves as cowards, if by it we can influence him to save his life, and in that hope, Spice did sign the petition, though he knew it would be rejected, but Persons said, I will not sign, what is my life, that for its sake my comrades should stand before the world as cowards and their death be lost to the cause. What is my life, that for it they should satisfy the portion of the states atone, when he said, I want to make them do something for which the anarchists shall hate them. Take your petition, I will not sign. Ah Mr. Greenell, astute as you all you failed, you did not make them waste the wine of the sacrifice, you could not make the anarchists hate them. No, but for every drop of blood you spilled on that November day, you made an anarchist, you sent their words on wings of flame in many tongues and many lands, where you hoped to sow the seed of hate. The immortals of love have bloomed, and tonight ten thousand nay, thrice ten thousand, repeating reverence, the names of Persons, Fisher, Engel, Ling and Spice, lost the cause, gain a thousand fold, whenever men dream of liberty and dreaming there, endearing strike, there above them white luminous shining as they stood upon the scaffold, appear the ghosts of Persons, Fisher, Engel, Spice. Wherever in the horrible conflict between laborers and soldiers, a shattered, shredded, striker is borne away by his comrades, who looking on his blood-head deeper, there walks the mangled corpse of Lusling, that brave beautiful boy who tossing his proud head with his towny hair like a lion's mane, and gazing with doubtless eyes, full at the court about to sentence him exclaim, I do believe in force, hang me for it. Ah, you say, you are talking poetry, let us see if we are not near the solution of the problem of martyrdom. The answer to the question, watch how it profit a man if he ate echoes and yet lose his own life, since there is no work, no divorce, no knowledge, no wisdom in the grave river he goth. Let us then ask another question, what is a man? The theological idea was a soul and a body, but science says the body is so much lime, so much iron, so much sulfur, so much carbon, and so on, which disintegrate at death, and pours into other forms, but cannot be destroyed. But what is the soul? The scientist answers a compound, an organism of certain psychological elements, just as much facts as the physical ones which accompany them. The soul of man is so much courage, so much energy, so much prudence, so much daring, so much poesy, so much fear, hope, and so on, through the qualities that make a man, as the body of every individual is a little different in the proportions of its composition from every other, so is the soul. This is all that makes an individual, but the soul elements, like the body elements, are common to all mankind, and at death nothing is lost in the one case, any more than the other, only transmuted. Death indeed to the person who has thrown aside the all ideas of God and immortality simply means setting free of original elements to form new combinations. The lower forms being weeded out by the slough, but certain actions of natural selection, the higher constantly becoming more active and beneficent to all the nobler elements of our comrades brought so strongly forth in that unjust trial, sentence, incarceration, and execution. Death met only an intensely larger life, and when I say this I do it, not only from my own theoretical standpoint, but in the certain knowledge that such was their belief and acceptance in the case of persons and fissures at least. I know it from the lips of one who never lied, one who lifted the standard, when it was taken down, one who saw them day after day in prison, one who would have gone to the scaffold with them, one who strangled by the invisible rope of poverty. Now lost six feet deep in the eternal dark, with an eternal smile upon his lips, diodilum. And these were his words, in so exalted estate worthy, so sure that death by the gallows was but a means of spreading further into the hearts of the people. They loved the ideas apart from which they had no life, that it was exactly the truth when Fisher said, this is the happiest moment of my life, and those who saw his face say that it shone with a white light on the scaffold. This then is the justification of sacrifice, even to death, that through it the most active and enduring element in the martyr's personality is projected into the infinitely greater life of the race. Let us bear this thought with us, let us believe that from under the granades shaffed at Walham, from under the stone pedestal, we are on the warrior mother, with the great sorrowful stern eyes, stands grasping the dagger while she drops the royal on her slaughtered child. From under the earth and the night and the blight of death we hear again, let the voice of the people be heard and low in the ear that listens, the murdered fire repeating, I am not dead, I am not dead, I live a life intense, divine. Yours be the death for the fled, but all the morals shall be mine, and of the fruit of the sacrifice. Section 2 of Selected Works, Haymarket Speeches by Voltaire Indeclare This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org November 11th, from Selected Works, Haymarket Speeches by Voltaire Indeclare Year of the year, the rising sun of November 11th, fruits of the world, the elongating shadow of the Chicago gallows. Year of the year, the knowledge of the history of a governmental crime, spread and spreads. Year of the year, the voices strangle to death, cry louder through the silence. It is as if all these years were a thin screen behind which walk the spectres of a revolution, wearing on this day the faces of those men, done to death for speaking. Parsons, fissures, engels, lingues et spies. It is as if these mute faces were bidding us remember their prophecies, and to note how truly they are marching to fulfillment. Every year the government's hands become redder with the blood that mortars to free speech. Every year we hear yet more play than the whizzing of the wings of the birds of a coming storm. Sometimes we find that it is already the sound of the storm itself. And sitting in our corner, we repeat the history of November 11th, and grind our hated shop. We tell ourselves again of a famous maccomic strike. We see the police riding down the defenseless people, crying, shoot the good damn son of bitches. We see men club bruised, knocked under the horses feet in the sacred name of the maccomic reaper works. We hear our comrades calling for a meeting of protests. We shift our eyes to the hair market on the 4th of May 1886. We see Parsons, spies, filledon. Speaking from the wagon and the crowd listening, then the police marching in double column, coming down Deepland Street, turning about firing, a man falls. Struck by a police bullet, he clutches his sight and rives open the ground. A thin line of blood oozes out, oeuvres have fallen. Suddenly a vengeance goes over our heads, a thing like a lighted cigar, that falls and burst with a lu, sullen roar, and men fall everywhere. Then comes the terror, people rushing to accuse, oeuvres to escape accusation, imaginations become realities, and men see bombs reflected from their eyes. Wherever the look, the police frighten, become ferocious, they seize and club at every turn. It is indeed the reign of the police, and gradually the anaconda of the law cohes tight and tighter. It accuses our comrades, Parsons, who brought his wife and children to the meeting. Presumably to be mangled by the bombs, Fisher, because he set up the orbiter's item, spies, because he was the editor, Engel, because he too set rebellious type, Filden, because he spoke of an outworking mansqu'e beatings, beating them prepared for the violence of capital, Schwab, Marlin, gentle Schwab, who also wrote articles, nib, for he had a red flag in his house, and organized trade unions, Ling, a beautiful cohes, Ling, who was a bomb maker. But we did not even know till the next day that the meeting had taken place, and whose bombs bore no resemblance to the vengeance. They arrested them, all except Parsons, who voluntarily came into the court and gave himself up for trial, because he believed himself so sure of proving his innocence, that he did not doubt the issue. Bit a mistake. The capitalists and their tools, Judge Gary and Prosecutor Greenell, had determined to hunt Anarchy to death. Repossession of iniquities called the trial begins, the states were atone, both that he will have a jury packed to kill, both openly in the court, that though these men are being tried legally for murder or conspiracy to murder, it is Anarchy which is on trial, it is a political opinion which is to be hang, here in this astounding republic which sprang into existence as the expression of a free political opinion. Not a man of the jury who does not admit that he is already prejudiced against the prisoners, not a single peer among the twelve. All or of a very parasite class, which our comrades had shown in their articles and speeches, could not continue better the expense of the slavery of the producers. The verdict was pronounced before a word of witness was taken, and we all knew it. Then the delay, the agony, the tigerish cockatting, with justice to the prosecution, the horrible parings about our homes, our country, and our free institutions. Then the speeches, immortal voices, going to the ends of the earth, and loud above them, the frank harsh defiant, ringing sentence of him, who was least and orator. But bravers among those who were all brave, I do believe in force, hang me for it. Then the petitions to the governor, the telegrams from the ends of the earth, the pleadings of their families, the swaying of the popular minds towards mercy, the petition tables in the streets, the crowds rushing to sign or to knock the tables over. As they swing towards this or that, the forbidding of all public speech and the subject by mayor rock, the forbidding of the singing of the mausayers, wonderful song that it should style into prohibition, our free institutions, the slow passing of days and the tightening, the relentless desperate tightening of the coil of the anaconda, the commutation of a sentence of filden and shrub to life imprisonment, the refusal of persons to appeal for commutation, though he knew it would be granted if he did, preferring to die with his comrades rather than oblash granel and do something to make the Anarchies hate them. November 10th, link triumphs over the law, free dynamite cartridge given him in a cigar by a friend. He smokes the cigar and dies with hoax tear anarchy on his lips. In his cell at night, persons sings anilory, listens to the builders putting up the gallows and sleeps. November 11th, a thick cordon of police around the jail, Mrs. Parsons and Mrs. Holmes, with their little Lulu and Albert Parsons, going from one to the other for permission for a promised loss interview. Hassan al-Aunt till at last arrested and thrown in prison, even the little children's bodies tripped naked in the terrorized search for dynamite and so we wife and children lying in cells. The condemned man goes to the gallows and never knows. Wildheim and the lost stock of the sewing is completed. Under the raw, abdominal sky, men with bare heads are baptized with a solemnity of that faith which already seems springing from the yet enclosed tomb. And the year's pause, the cemetery of the rites forbid 11 November processions to the tomb. They cannot forbid the processions of force and acts which go out from it. As the development of a struggle in which we died so early goes on, more and more clearly sound their prophecies. More and more clearly do we recognize that their work is our work, that one vengeance is the mother of many, that the crimes of states are accumulating, and from the Chicago gallows to the Borsedona torture room, there's one logical alliance of the powers that starve men, and that's from the corners of the earth to its centers, there's growing the opposing solidarity of the starve. We watch over the morning of the end, and the light grows over Wildheim, end of November 11. Section 3 of Selected Works, Heimocket Speeches by Volterine de Claire. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. November 11, from Selected Works, Heimocket Speeches by Volterine de Claire. Greater love hath no man, none van vis, that he give up his life for his friend. We obey to whom was given that utterness of love, we into whose ears there came a crying through the wildness of poverty and shame and pain, a wind through the desert from the land of promise, verses that said, it is not right that you should hunger. It is not just that you should be denied one of the glories of this earth. The world is wide, it is not reason that you should bury yourself in a narrow den and see the earth from behind a cave mouth while a bell that you could rustle in your hand, so is free to cross the continent and pick its food where it leads. It is not fairness that the things you have made should be taken from you by the hand that did not make it, and you be left with nothing but the smut and smell and memory of the torture of its making. It is insane that man should rot for want of things and things for want of man. Insane that millions of creatures should huddle together till they choke while millions of acres of land light desolate. Insane that one should pour down his throat, the labor of hundreds in a single night and those hundred always near the gateway of famine. It is criminal to believe that the mass of earth ought to be dumb animals with nothing before us all our lives but eating, sleeping and toiling at the best with all the light and loveliness of nature and of art and unknown realm of delight to us to which we may look only as the outcast at Eden. It is stupid to allege, still most stupid to believe that you who are able to do all the hard things of this world to burrow and dig and hammer and build, to be cramp and choke and beaten and kill for others are not able to win all for yourselves. You are not helpless if you do not will to be. You workers who labor and do not share, you need not be the ever tricked jupes of politicians who promise what it is not in their power to perform and perform what their buyers order them to. You have a need to learn your own power to help yourselves. A need to learn the solidarity of the interest of all those who work. A need to learn to trust yourselves to take your rights by no indirection, through no intermediary but openly in the spot where they are denied from the one who denies them and having taken keep the wealth and the love and the beauty of this earth or yours when you already take them, you are no beggars at your brother's table children of one plenteous board, there is enough for all and none need want. Do they tell you to look to the kingdom of God, we tell you to look to the kingdom of this world for verruly men have looked long enough to purse more time justice and thereby only supported another injustice, the trade in salvation and buying and selling of heaven they tell you they have always been rich and poor and that what has always been always must be it is not true that they have always been rich and poor neither is it true that what has always been must always be men and the societies of men are creatures of their conditions responsive to the pressure upon them from without lack all other things and not only liable to change but bound to change every age finds own adjustment there have been times and places where all men were poor as we should think them now yet no injustice done for all shared alike there have been whole races of men with indefinite history behind them who never knew mine and fine they have passed away people and system together with a method of making a living and property with all these varying forms of attendant slavery has come into existence in response to the irresistible demand for exchange to suit new methods of production and as it had to come, so it will have to go it is impossible it should continue for under this plethora of products turned out by the newer methods property has lost its power to balance men and the thing shoved out by the tireless flying steel hands parling great masses, products accumulate the turla at the base is flatten under the weight which property makes it impossible to distribute the mountain of riches crushes its creator men and things a lot waste it cannot go on the dead weight cannot forever press down the living energy in the end distribution must come out from its burrow comes raven a distorted mangal bruised and bleeding figure mishapen ugly black covered with hell light suffocated gasping its struggles unto its feet at loss wipes the blood and sweat out of its eyes gives a wild stare at this mountain of gold and gloss and glittered has made catches a brief vision of the dwellers on the mountain and with a mad cry leaps upon the thing to destroy it he is a giant steel has he not down there in the underground been through the blows that temper and fires the trial maim and lame there is brown in him yet seared and numbed he can yet feel for a white fruit the hand that hammered the balls has a wild grasp in it still that lays hold and rends her support more desperately than it put together the mountain is leveled and he begins again he is the revolution and he is a fool for he will need to make and destroy make and destroy until he destroys the institution which makes accumulation possible he why he you working people you are that fool you are he who scoops the sea and dies in the desert for a cup of water you are he who piles that mountain of wealth he finds nothing better to do with it when it crushes him thereafter than to set fire to it but listen fool there is something better for you this thing property is not the final word of a human intellect with regard to the distribution of wealth beyond the smoke edge of his frightful battle of men and machine what lies the idol of communism perpetual freedom or access to natural sources of wealth never to be denied by men to his brother men perpetual claim on the common wealth of the ages never to be denied to the living by the dead perpetual claim upon the satisfaction of all common needs of a human body never to be denied to the living by the living beyond the smoke wrath of the battle what lies days of labor that are sweet men and women doing the work that nature calls them to that in which the delight laboring at the chosen service not one into which they have been forced working and resting at reasonable hours sleeping when the earth sleeps not driven out into the darkness like an un loved child to turn night into day and cripple the over driven body by unnatural hours of pleasure to learn from sleep chosen toil room recreation sleep this poor outcast animal men ought to be yours beyond the smoke rim of the battle what lies the death of cities the people resurgent upon the land the desert blossoming into homes the air and light of nature once more sending the strength through nerve and vein and with it the less power to fill the joy of existence that one is something more than flesh to feed and sleep a creature of colors and sounds and lights with a skin and ear for a bird song as ready a knife or a teeth of cloud as any woodsman in the older days a creature with us finally tears for pictures and books and stature and music and with a hand to execute them too as any man who lives to the opinion of sweat a bices library with your dribble blood and condensers the flesh that has vanished from your bones into the mobile alcoves beyond the smoke hills of the battle what lies life life not existence life what has been denied to you love that has ever been reserved to your monsters the broad world and all these pleasant places and all these pleasant things this was the cry that came to us and we listened and heard we followed the crying voices through this wildness of brick and stone for it was a fair hope and who would not wish to dream it through none but the monsters and they were afraid the clamor for suppression of the voices let not these were cattle of ours get this vision of men they said else they will cease to be beast and weak and that demand for suppression produced the harem market bomb let it be said here and now in the city of the event in the teeth of those that compass the death of five men whose sin was to have prophesized their noble life to be born even through blood and pain after the man of old birth but the time has gone past we should stand and say as has been said in the post that the harem market bomb was a police plot the police never plotted anything half suggest the harem market bomb was the defense of a man who stood upon the constitutional declaration that the right of free speech and the right of the people peace able to assemble shall not be abridged worker or non worker an or kiss or or kiss that man acted as an American constitutionalist and if ever in this world the violence was just that bomb was just every policeman wounded by that bomb was the victim of a trace on able order of the inspector Bernfield at his door and the door of the monsters he served left the blood of Machastigan and his followers but did they care they who had been waiting their opportunity whose was the act did they care for the dead policeman whose names they used to hang their black line charge upon not there sacrifice into evaluation of law than they cared for the undiscovered hen that threw the bomb they cared only for the crying voices that threatened them with a new time they set themselves to do those men to death and they did it what need to repeat here the history of that black crime call the trial of a Chicago anarchist is it not fresh in all our minds how the jury of peers was chosen from the ruling clause not one single peer over accused among them all has not the highest official authority in the state of Illinois told with legal dispassion how everyone of his jury men admitted before he began that he was prejudiced and how each was so tempered with and twisted by the ruling judge but the lie I think I can't be fair was wrung out of their mouths do we not remember how Greenle boosted to Mr. Fever that he had back the jury to hang or not that deadwretched words yet in our ears saying anarchy is on trial but openly avowed to all the world that here in this country founded as the asylum of opinions men were being sentenced to death for their opinions how we not today admission coming in from every quarter such as this from the November number of the century magazine as to miscarriages of justice have there been no cases where groups of men among our most disinterested citizens moved by means information or touched by pride or influenced by false notions of honor and justice to men of conscience who spoke the truth and feared not at least one such co-celeb has not quite passed out of the memory of a living sad injustice to men of conscience this bit of justice comes a little late for the men who are dead yet it is an admission of all the political trials that ever outraged the forms even of legal justice to say nothing of a spirit it has remained to republics to give a worst if the saw of Russia to America here it is that we shoot men for marching on the highway and hang them for preaching ideas yes it is all fresh in our memories fresh as that beaten November day twelve years ago when persons fissure, anger, spice witted within for the signal of doom while without a helpless mother and wife plead for the keeping of a broken promise to the heartless cordon of the law around the sullenhole of death plead for the lost claps of the hen that in an hour could close no more the lost look from the eyes that would die and never know whose promise it was that had been broken fresh as the memory of a singing voice that went up in the night and gloom calling sweetly she's a the world to me fresh as the memory of a lifted hen and the voice repeating this hen is as steady as when in the old days it pluck the already ripe fruit from live stream fresh as the memory of the deathless words will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today long live anarchy this is the happiest moment of my life will I be allowed to speak oh men of America let me speak let the voice of the people be heard oh fresh as the memory of a gallows and thrap and the swinging dying bodies fresh as the memory of him a beautiful one the brave defiant one who took his death then waiting for your hangman fruit whispered hoarsely at the end long live anarchy fresh and fresh and forever fresh oh rulers of the world the memory of a deed you did that day grain in our hearts as the holy atule doubt not you shall be remembered doubt not you shall be paid with what measure you meet unto others it shall be metted back unto you again no item of a record shall escape shall we not recall the tricks which welled up when terror and cowardice were abating and this as human nature began to assert itself have we not before our eyes the picture of petition tables overturn in the streets in our ears the edict of mayor ruck no public discussion of the anarchy's case no singing of the mausayas do we not remember the four bombs found in link cell conjured through the stone walls and deposited there by anarchy's magic it is all remembered we know you are our creditors still perhaps you would have interest it is one of your institutions and what did you accomplish you struck a welding blue that beat the hearts of the working people of the world together you lifted out of the obscurity of a common man five names and set them as beacons upon a hill you sent the word anarchy ringing through every workshop you gave us a manifold crucifixion and dignified what had been a speculative theory with a sacrificial course of a religion in the heart of this black slag heap of grime and crime you have made a secret place for in it you lept off an arm from the cross and gave us the gallows and if it were given us to see tonight the thoughts of men made visible we should behold the grave at war hand in the heart of a star whose rays shot inward from the uttermost earth they are streaming over many waters and out of strange lands where the English tongue is never spoken they the invisible phantoms that pass in the darkness less of substance than the wind that floats the northern belief that might hear than all the powers that ever moved the human growth when governments went creeping they are pouring in tonight the intangible dreams that bind masses of men together in the bond of the ideal a bond that ties tighter than all bonds of flesh for it makes that one shall look into a stranger's eye and know him for his own shall hear a word from the antipodes and hold it for a brother's voice shall ask no name, no station, no race, no country, no religion but put himself beside his fellow worker needing no question since he knows that other labors and would be free a surge of comradeship sweeping over the earth is night the chat of rebellious voices singing the storm song of the peoples and earth circle of reverberations the lips that are dead long live anarchy run out this hour from platforms in every great city in the United States England, France, Australia talk low in Italy and Spain and Germany whispered in the cellars of Russia the cells of Siberia and murdered the lonely islands where our prison comrades rot away the words 12 years ago today they hang our comrades in Chicago and the debt is yet unpaid ah it is growing growing your fear word anarchy lean your ear to the wind and you will hear it when never dying never finish speech denied chocked by you that shameless day a warmest sanging glues on the world's communal flag step out step in by you the blood of a rose of death and of November 11 section 4 of selected works Haymarket speeches by Walterine DeClaire this is a library of works recording all library of works recordings are in the public domain permission auto-volunteer please visit librarybox.org our murdered comrades from selected works Haymarket speeches by Walterine DeClaire my heart is a weird grave tonight a grave I see as I saw it once I think I shall always see it too lying green and sweet in the octable light that flying its clean unbordered gold so generously un leaf and blade and stone and all around in the soft wind the tremulous flethings and murmurings that made one feel not in a place of death but in a place of peace I see again that speaking stone that silence that is more powerful than voice the pedestal with its graving the warrior woman and the mortal dead I feel the lost train's agony in the drone limbs the shakeless resolution in the warrior mother's sad stone eyes beyond to the right I see my companion's figure half turned from me and then across the sunlight between me and the stone I see a woman with a little child by the hand I see them stop and hear the pitying pathos in the woman's voices as she says to my comrades softly in German all under one's turn all under one's turn her answers and there is a low inarticulate exclamation of pity while the child stands with a shadow of awe on its face and then I hear the voices from beneath the sword sans crying under all the winds of the world till all men shalt hear and knew what they died for today it is said that they died because they preach a gospel of destruction and of hate all they died because they loved too much because they could not see the pain the madness, the blind struggle of ignorance and be silent considering themselves what did it matter to them that this poor sad animal man is up to turn in his rage and the other one who would help him did they not know it did they not know that the spirit of authority stamped into the human soul by unknown thousands of years would seek his vengeance but what did it matter we had their message to deliver their hope to give the fullness of their being to express what matter if it led them down into the storm and night and what was the message why that was the message that real justice and real liberty might come on earth that it was all force, all unnecessary this wild ways of human life of burn and sinu and brain and heart this turning of people into human rugs ghosts pictures, caricatures of the creatures we had it in them to be on the day that they were born that what is called economy the massing up of things is in reality the most powerful spending the sacrifice of the maker to the maid the loss of all the finer and nobler instincts in the gain of one revolting attribute the power to count and calculate out of the deep sense of genet wrong done to themselves and their fellows out of their abiding faith that it needs only to see where the wrong lies only to realize what possible change might come and the workers must rise in mass and restore themselves with a strong hand to their right they cried out there was a burning message read the heart and leaping in flame from lips that did not stop to pick and choose their words they preach in the common highway and gathered to themselves all who will to listen they preach in the common language for they were working men who did not study how to turn periods but wish to be understood they said what they met perhaps was and wisdom but if so it is the common mistake of all the great fervid souls that have others coached their way through the callous rins of men and touched the topid heart within till it beat drum music they believed that Lincoln and Grant were right when they predicted further uprisings of the people while conventions in the effort to re-establish some equilibrium in possessions they were revolutionists who believed that the revolution was art peacefully because of the historic tendency in the possessors to use force whenever their privileges are threatened they said so they advised their fellows to prepare for these things in this they may have been mistaken it may be that the diffusion of ideas and of the spirit of freedom may take such hold upon the general mind as will give us what we never yet have seen a great social change without violence or destruction let us hope so and us to the fact that so far their prophecies have been fulfilled and that not for any great change but for a meager bettering of conditions within the existing system men are shut open the roads and their corpses cry up from the sud for justice receiving none what like then is it to be when they ask for all that which nothing but their own ignorance keeps them from demanding when they ask for the restoration of the beauty of the earth and the great stores within her bosom when they ask for the free use of that which the genius of men not of men has made when they reclaim their right to the best in the world not to the meanest and poorest when they ask for room and plenty of room each and everyone no meager little yard fenced in with walls but acres without fences where they may watch things grow and blossom and feel again the joy of life and the sweet kinship when they are doing things learn the forget and law of the savage who knew all the colours of the leaves and the shapes of them and the way they turned to the sun and the peculiar instrument that played in the throat of every bird and the promises of weather that birded in the sky and so every night a full clear and broken view of the great orc with all its doors not a blue patch cut into angles with roofs filed with smoke seen out of a cellar of existence and beholding the glory that is around him shall seen the cloud what he has not seen before beauties and possibilities endless where before was only heavy dull thing that resisted his will but must be turned for its master's sake nay when he shall fill in himself till now the cold dull heavy human cloud something stirring towards birth towards growth towards light and liberty when the nature that has been repressed in him chilled, thrusted, bound in abeyance shall struggle into gleams in those sad eyes and suffer the brutal and push out the backwards slanting brew when he shall feel tumultuous throbbing beating beating ineffectually but powerfully within him the desire to see something indistinct which shines barely luminous in his old darkness the vision of a larger fuller life the yearning for selfhood self expression being that of which he dreams or no longer to echo the thoughts of others to bring forth a note of one's own no longer to move at the word of others to move or be still at one's own desire what will it be when the digger in the depths down in the blackness and the fullness pictures to himself the life of light and takes it boldly when the toiler amid the machineries in the clang and clash and roar demands for his ears the sounds which mellow the silence which stills if for this poetry thing increase may not shut open the road what will the answer be when they demand all this we do not know but all this not one jute or tittle less than this an orchison means it means awakening of soul and body brain and heart and goodbye forever to the slaves content with small concessions perhaps when the rich and the rulers realize this when they understand that the non-processors have awakened to their own powers so now whose lives they hold so cheap for respect is generally given to him who respects himself and contempt to him who crawls perhaps when they know that ours is a universal gospel having its word for them as well as for the poor offering them the same as the others full life, liberty better ideals and purposes they too may accept it and the rental rejoin with us in working out the problem of society and freedom but with them or without them or hand against hand full life or full death humanity in mass moves towards the land of freedom and to borrow the imagery of Oliver Schreiner many of the who go down to the dark river that lies between and or swept away and or drowned their bodies do not even build the bridge and when at last the future men and women shall pass over the bridge built with bodies it will be the unremembered dead falling to day on every hand in field and factory and mine hope says shall be the pyres where need rest I speak of the daily sufferers the helpless victims of capitalism and the state who die and know not why they die but these are our comrades who are self-conscious, whistling who went with clear eyes to the gallows and died triumphantly as ever Eddie Morton did of all they of whom even their bitterest enemies had to say they died like brave men they will be known and remembered long even in the land of freedom their living heart beats as we step upon this swaying bridge we shall hear the death words crying to the fields of life or one and up along the banks of the farther shore there comes a drifting of unborn verses singing blessed of the dead who died for freedom shall I say over again what you have said every year these thirteen years that the specific act with which they were charged conspiracy with the thrower of a hammock and bomb was never remotely proven shall I repeat that the trial wasn't fair the jury prejudiced the judge commited conviction the prosecutor openly bragging they have packed the jury to hang Govanna Argel has saved me the trouble of all this whoever will dispassionately read his reasons for pardoning Filden knee benchwab will know it beyond a doubt they are taken from the court testimony itself you can ask nothing more they were tried and hanged for pitching anarchism the bomb thrower was never known probably never will be whoever it was he threw it as a knack of resistance to the unconstitutional proceeding of the police in breaking up a peaceable meeting the aggression began with the guardians of law and order who fired into the crowd and threw forth a bomb as an answer to their bullets right or wrong what to do with the right to advocate opinions but it serve as the leather to move the machinery of the law against our comrades it is all force that the hanging was done because they were preaching violence it is not violence the ruling clauses objective for they themselves ruled by violence and take with a strong hand at every door it is the social change they fear the equalization of men tyranny has often mistaken its means and the rulers of Illinois repeated history what they would have destroyed where they would have cursed they blessed and many one will stay with me tonight in answer to the question what may do an anarchist the hanging in Chicago well they are gone and we who are here tonight may not have long to stay for we are moving down for the middle line and those who live a strainer's life rarely live to be all but few or many our years we shall spend them working for that which to us is the only thing we hope and efforts of the younger generations we commit the memories of 13 years ago praying them never to forget the price paid by the dead nor the anguish of some yet living never to forget that the way to honor a sacrifice is to follow the spirit of it and that if to you too has come the vision of men made one without countries, nations, divisions, clauses without authorities, presci or civil with a peace that is real the equality which means free self expression be bold to bear witness to it picture it, work for it live for it if you can die for it if you must remember the dungeon and the gallows tonight and the flesh warm like yours that is death or corroding in prison cells and be not silent and the pain of condemnation of your own soul that lost judge to whom all cause or has nothing to whom you can tell no lies and who will be with you to the edge of doom to your elder you may at the end speak to scoffer and persecutor the beautiful lines quoted by our beloved persons near the lost I am not dead, I am not dead I live a life intense, divine yours be the days forever fled that all the morose shall be mine and of our murdered comrades section 5 of selected works a mock at speeches by the terrain declare this is a library of extracording all library of extracording for more information or to volunteer please visit libraryworks.org memorial address from selected works a mock at speeches by the terrain declare blessed are they who die at the flood tide of hope in the strength of the youth of the spirit they whose memory among men was fixed at the hour when life was high and full and the task they had set themselves to do seemed worth doing to be stricken at the moment when being is richest and suit to remain forever an image of unconquerable youth and faith through all men's future yes that was worth the bitter waters of martyrdom and so he knew and felt who facing his agony called through a door of doom this is the happiest moment of my life to have known but two things work and poverty not to have known two things rest or ease to have searched and found at last the light of liberty the light of a living faith in living possibilities to have preached that faith and been done to death for it and still to have gone to the gallows firm and unshaken and with once lost voice still to proclaim that hope for other men that was to reconquer youth and see that the moment of greatest faith and greatest fortitude and so died he whose lost words were long live anarchy to have felt oneself a prophet of a great storm to know that the price of one's cry is a scaffold but that after the awful moment of strangulation is passed once burns shall preach from under once burial stood more powerfully than once living tongue that so once work remains active and persistent till the history of oppression shall have faded from the human mind as he did surely know who said that time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today yes those hours of exaltation were worth years of ordinary life to have stood at the summit of moral greatness and renounce the possibility of life and freedom in the end choosing to take no higher task than once whole right and rather than that to give all to have loved the common people and to the lost and died with a dear loving tender appeal living both words as a purse of once hot forever that was to die a supreme death and so died he whose lost breath said that the voice of a people be heard sculptured by death they stand upon their gallows pedestal and behind them the mutilated face of that heroic boy still whispering with his tone and shapeless lips hock dire anarchy and whenever a blaze from the storm they thought all streaks across the world it reveals the Chicago Tibet it's proof standing there on just as they stood 19 years ago unshaken and unaltered had the vindictive terror of the bourgeoisie been satisfied with the smaller sacrifice who knows our comrades might have grown weary and worldly wise like other men and in a little while their words and their deeds been forgotten but nothing but death suffice and they who smote out the fire of life at the full heat smote only to scatter alive sparks flew in the wind and kindled everywhere and though there is nothing but ashes in the fire for grave there are flaming memories from worlds end to worlds end tonight in the light of those memories we meet less we forget unless you forget who did this thing you would be glad to forget and believe that anarchy was strangled 19 years ago and the rats driven to their holes but long ago you learned that anarchy was not strangled by the movement of the working people and sometimes you fancy you hear the rats knowing and in your terror you want to strangle again for not yet have you learned the lesson that men die but principles live this night they sit in an idaho jail three men accused for the same reasons and by the same efforts as those used in Chicago and if in the end Meyer, Haywood and Petibon go free it will not be because you have any intent to do justice because your artificers will have failed for organizing war upon your system of slavery these men are obnoxious to you and you seize upon an anonymous act of violence to accuse them of conspiracy it is ever the court word and small wonder you impute it to others in view of the miserable lies and tortures you resort to to extort confessions of conspiracy from weaklings whom your cruelty drives mad while this time you have overshot the mark you will not learn by it so long as teachers rise up to teach the reconstruction of society without you so long you will do them to death in prison persecute somehow until the working people in mass declare an end of your privileges until then you will continue to post all my nerves stupid and hysterical laws such as the Illinois conspiracy law and the New York criminal anarchy law and the witch at present 11 persons most of them under 20 years of age before the crime of having attended anarchy smithing and who such is the elasticity of this law which leaves the definition of the offence to the judges discrimination are liable to be sentenced to 10 years imprisonment not for having said anything but for having heard someone say something but though you do all this in the end the reconning will be paid you will burn it in and burn it deep into the slogged brains of the people at loss and tend down and kill for trying to liberate them you will have taught them the lesson of cruelty and they will show you that they have learned it for with what judgment you judge you shall be judged and with what measure you meet it shall be metted back unto you again and heaping full it is very still at all hem so still you may hear the falling leaf and nothing moves under the ground but in the silence you can feel the gathering of the judgment of memorial address section 6 of selected works haymarket speeches by valterine de claire this is the library box recording all library box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librarybox.org november 11 20 years ago from selected works haymarket speeches by valterine de claire a peaceable meeting of protest against the murderous attack d'un espèce because of an approaching storm an un provoque attack by 200 police upon the rim net of a meeting a solemn glue in the air a dull and angry roar wounded and dying police and citizens terror and consternation bewildered faces and flying feet a panic circumcity full of a savagery of fright supports the 4th of May 1886 into history a wild and insane spirit of revenge a determination to hang somebody as many as possible a determination in a conspiracy theory which would drag in those from the police and the partisans of all order most dreaded a vicious resolution to use every method every trick no matter how shameful to bring hate men to the gallows to deceive and inflame the public mind to twist the law to admit prejudice jurors to suborn pejorie to rule out every fair-minded person from a chance of influencing the trial in favor of the accused to convict at all costs and to hang those who were set themselves and they fulfilled it and with the hanging of their victims the curtain went down upon the tragedy and the 11th of November passed into history there was a comedy played afterwards a comedy in which the victimizers became the victims and paid over thousands of good round dollars to their servants the police for protecting them from conspiracies which were hatched in the police stations the comedy lasted about 3 years and was very funny it however has not passed into history it was thought better to preserve the memory of it by oral tradition the tragedy however is written it is in the school histories of the country and every child who studies the administration of the presidents learns about it and this is what he learns that in the year 1886 there were many strikes and labor troubles that there was a small but dangerous class of people in Chicago called anarchists and during one of their meetings a bomb was thrown killing a number of policemen and several of the anarchist leaders were convicted of conspiring to throw it and hanged all up and down the land millions of school children learn that paragraph with such additional embellishments as their teachers see fit to provide and the half truth and altogether lie of it goes on killing the source of the murdered men as once the scaffold killed their bodies and in spite of all the malice and the injustice and the ignorance and stupidity that have heap and or heaping outrage on their memory the conquering voices of the dead men rise and the conquering spirit that animated them in those days of bitter doom the spirit of love and faith in human possibility triumphing over all oppression and suppression slowly makes its way 20 years have died up in their graves since they died on the gallows and venom and spite and fear most venomous of all have had their say yet other voices sometimes have spoken great lawyers have said it was a shame and general Trumbull tried the judgment of the Gary had thought it necessary to defend it and Jean P. Holger said and did a thing or two and now after 20 years a man of different stamp has spoken and a great conservative magazine has published his say Appaltern's magazine for October contains an article entitled The Hemorquette and Afterwards by Charles Edward Russell a newspaper reporter for the NY world in 1887 and who there is much misinformation therein when did the newspaper scrub ever neglect to furnish misinformation the general intent is plainly to do justice to the memory of a murdered man I do not know whether this Mr. Russell tried to do anything to save them while they were yet alive I never heard that in all these 20 years he tried to tell the world the truth he has told here but it is something that at last he has spoken and said that the conspiracy church was conceived in a spirit of revengeful fury that the working out of it was interested to a man afflicted with delusions who arrested every person that spoke defective English as a rifle conspirator and extracted confessions to shoot his purposes that the methods of a trial were unusual Mr. Russell did not choose a harsh word there that so far as the record goes the bomb might have fallen by accident or been heard by a lunatic or by somebody that never heard of the accuser Very grateful I am to Mr. Russell for his tribute to the beauty and magnanimity of Albert Paulson's character very glad I am that he has told the readers of the appellations how till the end till the very last Paulson's et he complied with the formality of the law and signed the petition to gov Auguste B but that he would not do so because he would not desert those others whose lives could not be saved what he does not add is this that Fischer and Engel were willing to sign the petition if he agreed to it not that they hoped for themselves but hoped for him but he knowing they could not be saved said that every night in Juliet upon retiring and every morning on arising by the thought that I had made cowards of them in vain no I shall die with them not grateful to Mr. Russell I am for his contemptous rating of adult Fischer and his misery recognition of the abilities of Spice and Schwab and Fildon yet one cannot quarrel with another's impressions as long as there is no malice in their statement and I let that pause but when it comes to Ling then all at once the fear man disappears and the sensational news artist of the creation we all learn to know so well 20 years ago comes to the surface under his past digitation the human being disappears and a monster stands before you clothed with abnormal strength of body and capacity of mind a slim boy of 21 becomes a secret will resourceful and daring conspirator a wild beast a modern berserker the least human man he have a new etc etc the more I read the more forcibly became the contrast between this Ling of Mr. Russell's conceiving and the Ling painted by a good carly German lady who used to take the prisoners something to eat sometimes one day he said to her I was dancing in my cell last night they had a ball over there somewhere and I heard the music and oh I did so want to be there and dance in human desire and the part of the youth of 21 had Mr. Russell seen him dancing in his cell he would probably have read abnormal physical or mental something or other into this pathetic attempt of a cage young creature to pass the little hours of the prison cell but the reason for Mr. Russell's peculiar visions concerning Ling is that he feels nearly certain that Ling made the hammock at bomb Ling conceived the slaughter of the police Ling founded the lair and were therein Ling was the only anarchy of the seven because everything in short except the bomb thrower the latter was he says Rudolf Schnubbelt he does not give his reasons for these opinions he simply makes assertions now as to the lair and were therein it was not founded by Ling he was a member but not the founder nor suggest of it in the second place the lair and were therein had nothing to do with the hammock at bomb it would be rather ridiculous Morgan asked to maintain its civil rights because of the ballot box frauds which had rusted their political victory from them should be led by the news by one man and he a mere boy in the third place I do not believe Ling made the hammock at bomb for the reason that he pointed out the difference between it and the bombs he did make and why I do not think he was super human either mentally, physically or morally I think he was an exceedingly courageous man and an honest one and I do not believe he would have resorted to any petty subterfuges before the court I think if he had done that thing he would have said so as boldly as he did say other things there was no amount of candor in his speech Mr. Russell's confident identification of a bomb thrower is probably based on the letter written by Schnubbelt taking the responsibility for the act which may or may have not been true a lot of fairy stories always arise around a mystery of his kind and between one man's imagination and another's the mystery gets so elusive that even shrewder guesses than Mr. Russell find themselves at sea and adrift I believe that the matter will remain a mystery as it has remained for 20 years Captain Black has said in a statement printed in the laugh of persons but in his loss and the others to secure a reprie for the condemned man the effort was made on the ground that he had reliable assurance that the bomb thrower would deliver himself up and prove that he was a stranger to the accused and that we had no complicity with him the reprie was not granted and our comrades being slain I can see no motive for the bomb thrower ever revealing his identity a most silent figure he has paused across the world and left his mark upon it what does it matter now who he was it was not one of the eight men whom the state punished for it there are other legendary matters in the article that are positively untrue but they do not greatly matter the public may believe that Link's sweetheart gave him a bomb to kill himself with if it likes I do not the public may believe there were precisely 14 anarchists believers in the use of physical force grouped together in Chicago I take the statement with salt the public may believe the statement that the police behave with conspicuous courage in the face of a bomb and did not falter but they closed up their ranks and opened the dem-founded people who fled in all direction I shouldn't myself have thought it required conspicuous courage to fire open dem-founded and fling people moreover I have been told the gentlemen who being wounded in the leg by some splinter of a bomb sought refuge in a closet to whose friendly shelter six policemen had fled before him they begged him not to give them away the position may have been undignified and not altogether heroic but I do not blame those six policemen but all these things matter little now what matters now is that the world shall know how and for what our comrades died Mr. Rousseau says the world of men outside our country seems to have accepted the belief that the defendants were tried on the church that they were anarchists it may be well therefore to recall that they were tried merely on the church that they were accessories before the fuck of the murders of machias, G, Digan and others the world outside our country thinks very correctly that our comrades were tried for being anarchist and hang for being anarchist who then over again the states had only repeated that anarchy was on trial his final appeal was hang these eight men and save our institutions these are the leaders make examples of them well they made the example they murdered these men not because of evidence that they had conspired to murder Digan but because they preach the gospel of liberty and well-being to all and an end of the institutions which enslave the many to the few the men are dead, 20 years are dead but the strange doctrine that the preach is not dead nor step out nor forgotten the doctrine that there need be no poor and forsaken in the world no shelter, no freezing ones no creven and cowering ones biting the death for a cross in Iraq no tyranny of masters nor rulers but all these are not as we have been taught necessary but only ignorant and foolish that life may mean wide opportunity and rich activity for every human being born that mankind has only to conceive its own possibilities seespraying upon itself and combine its powers for the conquest of the earth foretold to become easy and fruitful a thousand fall so all may have the good things of the earth and more than that may have free time to learn what really are good things and the vulgar ideals imposed upon it by its dead parts and its lavish present its stupid pursuit of valueless things begotten by this profit making system of production free time to partake of its heritage in the triumphs of science which only too often remain barren in the studies of great thinkers and fruitful because of the lack of the practical genius of the common man or worse become the instruments of further robbery in the hands of power this is strange doctrine we can die for preaching it and yet another strange doctrine though really it is as all as man himself that these things ought to be won not by interesting power to legislators but by the direct dealing of a sympathetic support finally by complete socialization of the sources and means of production if in the final struggle as a measure of resistance force become necessary when use it for saying these things our comrades died the hemoquet bomb was only the excuse for silencing their tongues while the tongues were silenced but now the silence speaks as a prophet voice foretold still from the prison earth in the shade of the gallows tree there springs the blossom of human hope the blood root blossom the blossom with the wax white face and the red root strange it should grow always there leaves from black mud and hope the highest hope the blossom and hold it to their hearts and the ideal of our dead works in the eyes of the living and eyes meet eyes and the light of them crosses the seas and the boundaries of the nations and the dream grows the dream of a common fraternity of humankind and the equal liberty of brothers and greed and tyranny and patriotism dividing men from men making them strike foul blows against each other this very thousand thousand years for we are of the past the dead and the new world our world the nationless world of free men belongs to the living and the future and of November 11th, 20 years ago section 7 of selected works hemoquet speeches by Volterine Decler this is a library box recording all library box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librarybox.org the defiance of August Spies from selected works hemoquet speeches by Volterine Decler if death is the penalty for proclaiming the truth then I will proudly and defiantly pay the costly price call your hangman truth crucified in circuitus in Christ, in Jordan and Bruno in Huss, in Galileo still lives they and others whose number is legion have proceeded us on this path we are ready to follow I think the soul that in those words breath its indomitable conviction to the men about to sentence him to death and 23 years ago to this step from the summit of Chicago's cavalry out upon the pathway of great ghost had in the moment of their utterance a greater vision than the narrow courtroom line with human hate the damning jury and the bitter libt judge I think that in that superb moment of defiance the do men look forth the girdle of faces the girdle of stone the girdle of time and the girdle of death and saw the immemorial procession whose number is legion marching marching unflinchingly up the human via de la rosa and fell into line with them and went up on the path with a rhythm of immortal footsteps in his ears the sounding of immortal echoes in his brain the figure that he and his comrades saw before them marched into which they were soon to merge the figure and the face opened the hill of sacrifice was it the figure and the face of Christ of Bruno of Galileo or that of a forgotten man lost in some unknown fight of yesterday was it not rather the great face that Swinburne saw and cried as he saw oh sacred head oh desecret oh labour wounded feet and hands oh blood poured forth in pledge to fate of nameless lives in divers lands and spent and sacrificed people of the great ground speechless Christ eh I think that boughs the vision of the time or slaying of the common man the man who has stood up to question the masters as to their handling of the world for they were common men who had reason to ask why the common wealth and the common things of the earth were not the common news and the common a building of life and they spoke in the common speech that was easy to understand the common people heard them gladly they stood in the street corners and spoke the gospel of self salvation the gospel of direct expropriation of natural and social wealth which by the operation of existing law has become the possession of a limited class and that was the crime that they had told the people to act directly and not through the intervention of political powers which could never be trusted they had told the people that the cause of their involuntary idleness and the inadequacy of their wages to buy back their products laying the system of property entrenched behind the moral law of the church and the forced sustained law of the state but more than all behind the ignorance and the humility the dog-like submissiveness of the workers themselves who crinch and kneel and kiss the hand that smiles them believing in their own slavery they had tried to awaken in these cowering holes some consciousness of their true condition some sense of what changes they might make in it some question why salvation and privation should exist some vision of the society when it did not exist some realization of who is the enemy some desire to dislodge that enemy from his seat of power some knowledge of how there would be saviors in political ranks buy and sell and cheat them always some resolution to depend no more open random out salvation from someone overheard but open their own direct united action for their crime let no one ever suppose that it was less than this the historians of this affair willfully or ignorantly I believe in most cases willfully have told the generation that has risen since that the 5 men done to death by the state of Illinois 23 years ago were executed because they had been proven guilty of conspiring to throw a bomb at a meeting on the hay market but this was never their crime as those who managed the trial were sentient to grinnell and the men whose tool he was but the excuse whereby they might crush the movement of the labouring people there was direct revolutionary action in his speech demanding their execution the state satanic came openly out dropping the technical lies upon which the prosecution was supposed to be based and plainly said that was the one truthful word he said men were to be hanged not because they had thrown a bomb had even known who threw it but because they had said working men you can never leave as men working at will and commanding the result of your work until you use the child's wealth this recording the law which robs you of it brushing that law aside as a dead letter and know that when you are ready to do this force will be used against you be prepared to use force in return now from the standpoint of the processor such speech is always a crime and of this crime they were really guilty the social revolt that we were dreaming of the social overturning which would have put down the mighty from their seat and exultant them of low degree was in the eyes of the monsters of the world a crime beside which the hammock had bombed was like the snapping of a pop gun in a boy's hands a world full of people not one of whom was hungry not one of whom was naked or shivering or ear sheltered or idle against his will work and he works or stop and he stops or this is mine you may be need it and I do not but it's mine touch it and you go to prison what? they should no longer have the power to starve anyone to freeze anyone to clutch the wealth they do not need what then would become of civilization ruination disorder chaos would follow oh to be sure a man might put such things in pretty books if they like print them in golden blue and deco aged paper and doodle over them before and often in a nap it would wile away an hour but talk them to the common people the people who might listen to it seriously the hulking brutes who might take it into their heads to argue there could be but one answer to such a criminal against the public peace away with him crucify him the terrible common people the sewer rats be called us then rats that have been driven into their holes the common people who bear the burdens of the world but are not to stretch out their unlovely hands to take the thing but they have fashion the common people who are so rude and so indelicate and so incapable of fine feeling and so unable and unworthy to enjoy the art and the glory of life the common people who are not fit to come among sensitive souls where high ideals are discussed because they are dirty and coarse and low oh yes it is always dangerous to talk to us I remember yes as if it was yesterday though it is 20 years ago and more the memory rankles yet of a delicate disgust of a would be reformer who came to me saying some striking minors came to the club last night and really they smelled no doubt they smelled and the chock-damp of the eternal night of a mine and all that the mine means the grime, the body rick the unwashed clovers and vile food the vile tobacco and the vile whiskey no doubt they smell of it all that is how cold is paid for by the common man who mines it creature of all disgust is the common man to those who do not pay the price for their little nasties he is dirty, yes he is dirty very very dirty the vomit of the engine and the fire pit is on him the grease of the machine the splatter of the gutter and the distillation of the sewer the ashes of the seated dup heaps the slime of rotting refuse every parasite and every germ it's venom and humanity has crawled up on him just as there is no foul and filthy hole above or underground into which it has not crawled yes he's dirty he's hulking and ill-shaped and ungainly yes his figure is unhandsome he has crapp on it too much crapping to vicious places where life's dead in the eyes and both clutch at him and sometimes he left a piece of his body in death's fingers when his shoulders bent together you go through a narrower aperture doing one work you become one-sided when familiarity with a machine breathes contempt your bus is in a hurry you feed your fingers to the machine sometimes when you wait the pleasure of bailing iron it occasionally explodes and peppers you with sparks and leaves something that looks like lepper spots up on the skin yes the common man is ill-shaped and deformed and unhandsome he is diseased with vile and unable diseases oh yes he sweated in our social slaughter pens till every vein ran fire instead of blood and then in raging thirst he has drank drank evil drinks that fill him full of alcoholic indifference and villiness lust and he has infected himself with a taint that has taken him to the hospital a thing for the worms to feed on before he was dead yes all that his coarse and loud mouth and dull ear and squint-eyed and his speech is lawsome yes his coarse he's the digger in the dung heaps the dung heaps doesn't make people fine but it has to be dug yes his loud mouth his peaks across the road engine and rolling wheels above the sound chaos of the city streets his peaks of work a loud sounding work in coarse work tones as men speak who have to do with imperative primal activities dull ear, oh yes sometimes you cannot distinguish a preference de l'extra and the slasher the rip-saw the saw has trained him not the violin a squint-eye yes he has squinted at micrometers in the semi-darkness of the shop till he cannot open his eyes wide anymore he has squinted at gorgeous till his sight is narrowed to a gouge he has squinted down the fruit of red hot furnaces till he has seen the very nerve of sight dazzled and blinded he drops his leads and looks at the green world outside with a fine image of the furnace through a trifectade his speech is loosome yes very loosome full of coarse and obscene images vulgarities for which he does not blush boisterous curses and vapid water for the worst of all the robbery that has been done upon him is that his soul has been rubbed away too and if the beauty and the strength of the body have been twisted and malformed stop away so to dim down the light of the inner man that might have been un junk heap of broken possibilities twisted and perverted passions yes the common man is all that rough and cuff misshapen, dull, vulgar, vapid and fit to grace his social festivity to boo and scrape in a dense salon or carry a lady's fun but also he has dug, he has mine he has buried he has tunnel, he has blasted and smeltered and forged he has ploughed and planted and gathered and piled and shipped and rebuilt and cleaned and scoured and repaired he has woven and cut and sewed and clothed and man's world cannot stand without him not for a day, not for an hour without the dancing monster and the fun carrier it still could spin right manually without the miner and the former and the sewerat never and seeing this and understanding this and feeling all the wrong and shame of our disinheritance both of the body and the mind and the wildness and this too is the common man the man who is something more than all this rest I have been saying for he is also the man who goes to and bury his fallen comrade when the man crushes him though he knows the chances to save a few and the chances that he also will be crushed or many the man who goes down into the sewer gas to save his railing companion and falls by his side the man who springs into the jaws of a sea to save from it he knows not and drowns together with a stranger the man who thrusts a heedless fellow craftsman from a danger truck and his ground to pieces for his generosity and the man who cries to all these weak atrophic opiated souls comrades, it is wrong the earth is as much hours as theirs those people who are shutting us out from its free use the conquests of the dead are as much hours as theirs those people who claim them as their soul and will not let us use them life can be arranged otherwise we do not need to be hungry because there is too much food no shelter less because we have built too many houses no naked because we have made too many clothes we do not need to be idle because someone has made so much profit but it pays him for us to be idle we can all work and all have leisure to straighten our backs and un bend our muscles and train our brains we can do this thing no one can do it for us no one will do it for us no one should do it for us if we are great enough to make these things we are great enough to use them great enough to manage the making and the dividing and if anything is made by us now which we in freedom would not make the labor which is too costly in human life for free men to make then let those who wish to use it make it or let it not be made the purpose of society should be to enable men to live more freely and more fully the purpose of work should be to build the workers' lives not to rock and slay and destroy them come then announce your will to be free men to take full hold on life and make it yours no longer be the ball for positions to toss back and forth they will all betray you be your own saviors so our comrades cried a quarter of a century ago and like the self forgetting fever died for it and they too were common men for this likewise is among the sacrifices but now and again they go up to Golgotha they want these five men proudly and defiantly believing in no after reward knowing there would never be any justice done to them but hoping and believing that their deaths would bear their message further and wider than their lives had done in Walheim you may read the stone cut prophecy the time will come when our silence will be more powerful when the forces you struggle today there stands a deftifying conviction and whether the years be many or whether they be few till the people awaken and take their own the shorty waits farther and wider indeed the words have already gone the breath of the gallows blew them on all the winds of heaven and men remember and commemorate tonight in London in Berlin in Paris, in Rome, in Madrid, in Barcelona seething in Barcelona in Melbourne, in Cape Colony what an American Commonwealth did on this day 23 years ago it's left together with the tyrannies of Europe proof of government to be what our comrades had said always and ever a tool of a property clause no matter what its form and it meant to death by force witness and acknowledge prejudiced jury and a hangman judge not for anything they had done but for what they had said in the name of what someone else had done all over the world their words are repeated but still the day of awakening until the people with their ox like eyes look patiently on and their own undoing while the yoke remains upon their necks and their deliverance taking seems far away maybe it will come sooner than it seems there are sudden darkening in the social sky at times in the meantime, less we forget and less our enemies think that we forget we keep the hangman's day the day they make corpses of men whose will in the world had been to make it a better place the day they baptize the cause of human freedom once again with blood through the receding years I see the ghost figures rise the luminous face of other fissures shining while crying this is the happiest moment of my life of a mutilated lips of loosling yet whispering Hockda Anarchy the homely study resolute teachers of anger saying long live Anarchy the ringing prophecy of spies and the clear sweet voice of Albert Parsons bleeding till the moment of strangulation oh we never knew what he wanted to say the figures pours along others and others rise behind them and later here in the 20th century the great figure from the ditch of montry he too done to death through a word of liberty in the name of the deeds of others how many more to pours into that dusky column of a mortal ghost very very many yet there will be no end till there is an end of a belief that ideas can be killed by killing men or an injustice made acceptable a dissatisfied people by putting a male hand upon the cryo's mouth until then the lot of the rebel will be to speak and to die for it so we keep the 11th of November that we may remember what was done what may be done again and if the lot comes to us that we too may know how to die end of the defiance of ogre spies end of selected works he markets pictures by Volterine de Claire