Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/59

 gathered in the old Whitechapel Club, and many of their names have since become known to literature. They, or most of them, had worked on the anarchist cases, from the days of the strike in McCormick's reaper works, down to the night when the vivid pen of Charlie Seymour could describe the spark that soared in a parabolic curve from the alley into Haymarket Square, and then to the black morning of the hanging; and they knew.

It was all very simple, too. If it were not for the tragedy, and the wrong that is so much worse than any tragedy, one might almost laugh at the simplicity. It shows the power of words, the force of phrases, the obdurate and terrible tyranny of a term. The men who had been hanged were called anarchists, when, as it happens, they were men, just men. And out of that original error in terminology there was evolved that overmastering fear which raved and slew in a frenzy of passion that decades hence will puzzle the psychologist who studies the mind of the crowd. And the student of ethics will find in the event another proof of the inerrancy and power of that old law of moral action and reaction, according to which hatred ceaseth not by hatred, but by love alone. It may be found stated accurately and simply in the Sermon on the Mount, and there is still hope that Christendom, after another thousand years or so, may discover it, and drawing therefrom the law of social relations, apply it to human affairs, and so solve the problems that trouble and perplex mankind.