Page:The Chicago Martyrs (1899).pdf/58

 50 pretation of the language used that night, there was anything in that speech that could reasonably be called incendiary.

You will bear in mind that I said "Men in their blind rage attacked McCormick's, and the police shot them down." Now, certainly a man who charges a class of people with doing something "in their blind rage," cannot be said to approve of their acts; cannot be said to be encouraging that blindness, and the fact that I said "in their blind rage," shows that I did not approve of attacking McCormick's; that there was an underlying meaning to it, which, when read between the lines, explains all that it should logically have meant. "When men in their blind rage attacked McCormick's, the police shot them down." There was a conflict between these men. As I have claimed here and elsewhere in the city, these men did it in their ignorance. They did not understand it. They looked upon McCormick as a cause of their trouble. We have been represented—or at least they had drawn that inference from disputes which had occurred with McCormick in the last year or two—that it was such men as McCormick that were the cause of their trouble, and in their blindness and their ignorance they attacked McCormick's building. It is not disputed that I said the words just quoted. Now, if these men had understood, as Socialists understand it, this industrial question, they would have known that it was foolish and ridiculous to think that they could better their condition by attacking a person's property. If they had understood this social question as Socialists understand it, they would have understood that it was the system and not the instrument of the system, not the victim of that system. I claim that McCormick, Jay Gould, and William H. Vanderbilt are as much the victims of the system which obtains, and which I claim is an unjust one, as are the beggars who walk the streets and crowd the station houses to keep themselves from being frozen to death in the winter. And it is these particular classes that are arrayed against each other. True, one of the victims gets a better share of the profits of the system than the other. They are no lees the victims, and the conflicts and quarrels that exist among them affect them both more or less. Therefore I say that when I said "Men in their blind rage attacked McCormick's, and the police shot them down," it was carrying out that idea, which was intended to be conveyed to these people, that it was the system which protected McCormick's interests. But, as I went on, I said: "When McCormick attacked their interests the police did not attack McCormick." I bad claimed that the present social system is sustained more in the interests of one class than in the interests of another. I claim that it is necessarily so. Now, McCormick's factory may be said to be his tools, if you please—his means of getting a living. And certainly when the rioters attack his factory they attack his means of livelihood. The police came to McCormick's defense. I believe, your honor—and I am well acquainted with the policemen in the district in which I live—that there is not one of them who believes that I entered into a conspiracy to kill a policeman. I have no better friends than the policemen who have traveled that beat. And I do not say that policemen go to attack rioters because it is their desire to do so. It is because they are the preservers of peace under the present social relations, and they were sent there to keep these men from destroying the means of livelihood of McCormick.