“A. R. PARSONS.”
SAMUEL FIELDEN.
Samuel Fielden was born in Todmorden, Lancashire, England, in 1847, and spent thirteen years of his boyhood working in a cotton mill. In early manhood he became a Methodist minister and Sunday-school superintendent in his native place. In 1868 he came to New York, worked for a few months in a cotton mill, and in the following year came to Chicago. For the greater portion of the time since he has worked as a laborer. He joined the liberal league in 1880, where he met Spies and Parsons. He became a socialist in 1883, and has spent much time as a traveling agitator of the International Working People’s association.
We feel sure that Samuel Fielden is to-day serving out a life sentence as the result of forming associations through which he was led to mingle with agitators anarchistic, whose teachings were treasonable. Though not endowed by nature with proclivities whose tendencies were toward violence and bloodshed, yet being full of vanity and of a vacillating nature was led to make speeches of an incendiary and revolutionary character which indentifiedidentified him with those responsible for the result of the fatal bomb, and doomed him to a life of unrequited toil and of penal servitude.
ADOLPH FISCHER.
Adolph Fischer, who was about thirty years old, came to this country from Germany when a boy, and learned the printer’s trade with his brother, who was editor of a German weekly at Nashville, Tenn. For several years Fischer was editor and proprietor of the Little Rock (Ark.) Staats Zeitung. This he sold in 1881, after which he worked at his trade in St. Louis and Chicago. After coming to Chicago he became a most rabid anarchist, and often accused Spies and Schwab of being half-hearted, and of not having the courage to express their convictions. He, like Engel, believed they were not radical enough. At one time he, with Engel and Fehling, started De Anarchist, a fire-eating weekly, designed to supplant the Arbeiter Zeitung.
He entered with all his possible energy into the spirit of socialism and anarchy, so much so, that it became his only theme and the source of happiness to him which he fully expressed in his last words upon the gallows, viz: “This is the happiest moment of my life.” If that were the case, what an unendurable life were his, and the prospect of dissolution offered a rest from the self-inflicted torment of continuing to live.
GEORGE ENGEL.
George Engel was born in Cassel, Germany, in 1836. He received a common school education and learned the printer’s trade. He came to America in 1873, and a year later to Chicago, where he became a convert to socialism, and later a rabid anarchist. He founded the famous “Northwest group” in 1883.