Page:The Chicago Martyrs (1899).pdf/81

 Rh Do you think that this trial will be settled by my strangulation and that of my colleagues? I tell you that there is a greater verdict yet to be heard from. American people will have something to say about this attempt to destroy their rights, which they hold sacred. The American people will have something to say as to whether or not the constitution of this country can be trampled under foot at the dictation of monopoly and corporations and their hired tools.

Your honor read yesterday your reasons for refusing us a new trial, and I want to call your attention to it, if you please, on some points on which I think you are laboring under misapprehension. Your honor says that there can be no question in the mind of any one who has read these articles (referring to the Alarm and Arbeiter-Zeitung), or heard these speeches, which were written and spoken long before the eight hour movement was talked of, that this movement which we advocated was but a means in our estimation toward the ends which we sought, and the movement itself was not primarily of any consideration at all. Now your honor, I submit that your are sitting in judgment not alone upon my acts, but also upon my motives. That is a dangerous thing for any man to do; any man is so liable to make a mistake in a matter of that kind. I claim that it would not be fair to you to assume to state what my motives were in the eight hour movement; that I was simply using if for another purpose. How do you know that? Can you read and order my actions? If you go by the record, it will disprove your honor's conjecture, because it is a conjecture!

The State's attorney has throughout this trial done precisely what Mr. English, the reporter of the Tribune, when he was instructed to do by the proprietor of the Tribune, when he attended labor meetings. It was the custom of the chief editors of the large dailies to instruct those who went to labor meetings to report only the inflammatory passages of the speaker's remarks. That is precisely the scheme laid out by the prosecution. The have presented you here copies of the Alarm running back for three years, and my speeches covering three years back. They have selected such portions of those articles, and such articles, mark you, as subserve their purpose; such as they supposed would be calculated to inflame your mind and prejudice you and the jury against us. You ought to be careful of this thing. It is not fair or right for you to conclude that from the showing made by these gentlemen we were not what we pretended to be in this labor movement. Take the record. Why, I am well known throughout the United States for years and years past and I have come in personal contact with hundreds of thousands of workingmen from Nebraska in the west to New York in the east, and from Maryland to Wisconsin and Minnesota. I have traversed the states for the past ten years, and I am known bу hundreds and thousands who have seen and heard me.

Possibly I had better stop a moment, and explain how this was. These labor organizations sent for me. Sometimes it was the Knights of Labor; sometimes it was the Trades Unions; sometimes the Socialistic organizations; but always as an organizer of workingmen, always as a labor speaker at labor meetings. Now, it there is anything for which I am well known it is my advocacy of the eight hour system of labor; so it is with my colleagues here. But because I have said in this connection that I did not believe it would be