General Brook did not disdain to learn a lesson in tactics from the action of the mob itself during the fight with the militia. He halted out of range of the barricade till detachments could be sent so as to surround it on all sides. Gatling and Hotchkiss guns were brought to bear upon it from three directions. Neither the general nor his men had been predisposed by the sights they had witnessed on their march through the city to show consideration to the rioters. It was nearly six o’clock when everything was ready. The Gatling guns opened with a fierce fire upon the barricade, which threw the crowd behind it into utter confusion. When their fire ceased, the troops with a ringing cheer sprang forward and attacked the flimsy defences. The contest was soon over. The revolutionists broke into uncontrollable disorder. Some one among them raised a handkerchief on the end of a stick, and the troops were ordered to stop firing. About five hundred of those who seemed most active in the mob’s ranks were arrested; the remainder of the crowd was allowed to slink away. The riot was ended; and the soldiers, after first scouring the city to make sure that no more resistance was likely to be offered them, turned to the task of extinguishing with such means as were at their hands the smouldering fires, which still threatened danger.

It was found that about twenty-five hundred buildings had been burned. As the insurance companies did not insure against destruction by riot, the loss was complete and irremediable. How much property was stolen or destroyed in buildings which were not burned was never known; but there were few stores or houses giving promise of containing anything valuable which had not been looted. Nor was the loss of life ever accurately learned. Weeks after the restoration of order, dead bodies were discovered in cisterns and sewers or floating in the lake. It is not probable that all were recovered; but over seven thousand four hundred deaths are known to have occurred.

A few trials followed the arrests which were made by the army between the 23d and the 30th of April. But the socialistic poison had invaded the jury-box; and despite the horror which all the better class of citizens felt at the barbarians who had sacked the city, it was found next to impossible to secure a jury which would convict upon anything but the most overwhelming proof of actual complicity in some specified crime. This was of course difficult to obtain. Two men who had been recognized by several firemen as the murderers of a policeman who attempted to drive them from an engine which they were destroying on the morning of the 20th, were hanged; a few were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; a few others were fined: but against the greater number all proceedings were dropped, and they were set free.

VI.
ANXIOUS FOREBODINGS.

No words can adequately describe the fear which fell upon good men all over the land when the real character and purpose of the riot became known. Considerable sympathy had been felt for the first day’s movement, which was rightly regarded as a protest against the stupid inefficiency of the courts, rather than an outbreak against the established order. But when the awful anarchy of the succeeding days came to be understood, and the true nature of the plot against society to be appreciated, there was something like a panic among men who had stakes in the prosperity of the nation, and whose wealth or homes depended upon the maintenance of order.

It was not a hopeful sign that, in the midst of this horror and dread which fell upon men of property and standing, the socialists everywhere openly expressed their sympathy with the “revolution,” and their belief that the Chicago riot was only the first gun in a battle which was to rage over the length and breadth of the land. Nor was the attitude taken by the Irish any the more reassuring. They had not engaged in the riots at Chicago, neither had they opposed the rioters. So far as could be learned, not a single member of any of the great Irish societies had been molested in person or property during the riots. In other parts of the country, too, the Irish leaders spoke with a new and strange tone. They expressed a strong condemnation, it is true, of the excesses into which the rioters had been “driven;” but in no case did they denounce the rioters themselves, or fail to express their sympathy with what they were pleased to term “an oppressed and struggling common people.”

Two days after the troops had taken possession of the city, the leading daily paper managed to collect enough material and men to issue a small four-page sheet. The leading article in this issue, in deliberately chosen but unmistakable language, charged that the Irish organizations of the city had not only sympathized with the rioters, but had in many instances actually given them material aid, furnishing them arms, acting as spies for them, and offering some of the leaders hiding-places when search was made for them after the restoration of order. No denial was made to this. But the Irish Press responded to the charge with a counter-accusation. It declared that the article was the result of partisan spite, inspired by the fact that the Irish usually acted with the political party to which their editorial assailant was opposed. With few exceptions, the Press of that party took up the cry, and charged his paper with having insulted “a vast and respectable body of citizens, in order to make contemptible political capital.”