Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/351

 These Shifting Scenes

(American editor and Socialist lecturer, born 1860. In the following paragraphs he has given a newspaper reporter's reminiscences of the Chicago Anarchists)

After so many years the passions and prejudices of the half-forgotten struggle ought to have died away, and men may now speak candidly and without restraint of these things as they really were. Let me then record my deliberate conviction that Albert Parsons never entertained the thought of harm against any human being, for I have seldom met a man of a more genuine kindness of heart; and if the men he denounced in his speeches had been in actual danger before him I am certain he would have been the first to rush to their defense from physical harm. And while I am on this subject, I may add an expression of a wonder growing upon me for many years, that no one has ever paid an adequate tribute to this man. I have not the slightest sympathy with his doctrines, if he believed in the violence he seemed sometimes to preach, which I could never tell. I have lived in the world long enough to know that the social wrongs that moved him to protest can never be cured by violence. Say, then, that the man erred grievously; if his error had been ten times as great it ought to have been wiped from human recollection by his sacrifice, and there should remain but the one image of him, leaving his place of safety and voluntarily entering the prisoner's dock. I doubt if that magnanimous act has its parallel in history. A hundred men have been elevated to be national heroes for deeds far less heroic. The fact that