Strong as a giant yet gentle as a child; utterly fearless yet without bravado, this great and loving soul cast his lot with the exiled slaves of the pits and kept his vigil over the defenseless women and children of the village as a loving mother might over the fledglings of her brood.
Is it strange that they loved him, trusted him, and that in the hour of their deadly peril they looked to him to shield them from their brutish ravishers?
In this tragic hour Louis Tikas measured up to the supreme stature of his noble manhood. He knew his time had come and with a smile upon his lips and without a tremor in his sinews, he faced his cruel fate. He asked no quarter for himself, but only begged that mothers and babes be spared; and with this touching plea upon his lips and the love of his people in his soul and beaming from his eyes, he was struck down by the hired assassins of the Arch-Pharisee and passed to martyrdom and immortality.
THE LITTLE LORDS OF LOVE. Progressive Woman, December, 1910.
The children are to me a perpetual source of wonder and delight. How keen they are, how alert, and how comprehending!
The sweet children of the Socialist movement—the little lords of light and love—keep my heart warm and my purpose true. The raggedest and dirtiest of them all is to me an angel of light. I have seen them, the proletarian little folks, swarming up out of the sub-cellars and down from the garrets of the tenements and I have watched them with my heart filled with pity and my eyes overflowing with tears. Their very glee seemed tragic beyond words.
Born within the roar of the ocean their tiny feet are never kissed by the eager surf, nor their wan cheeks made ruddy by the vitalizing breezes of the sea.
Not for them—the flotsam and jetsam upon the social tides—are the rosy hours of babyhood, the sweet, sweet joys of childhood. They are the heirs of the social filth and disease of capitalism and death marks them at what should be the dewy dawn of birth, and they wither and die—without having been born. Their cradle is their coffin and their birth robe their winding sheet.
The Socialist movement is the first in all history to come to the rescue of childhood and to set free the millions of little captives. And they realize it and incarnate the very spirit of the movement and shout aloud their joy as it marches on to victory.