“‘We will not hesitate to use anything when the time arrives. A revolution is near at hand. It must come. We want to abolish the present system of government. Some one must suffer in every reform, and lives must be sacrificed. I am in favor of the quickest means for the accomplishment of our purpose.’”—Despatch from Pittsburg, Pa., to the New York World, Feb. 22, 1885.
III.
A FEMALE SOCIALIST’S ADVICE.
“Mrs. Parsons, who is a colored woman, made an unusually fiery speech. She began by berating her hearers as cowards, and unworthy of the name of manhood, because they allowed the aggressions of capital to continue and their daughters to barter their virtue for bread. If they were men, as they claimed to be, she said, they would blow up every house on the adjoining avenues before they would submit to it. They would demolish the police-stations, court-house, and jails, and fling dynamite in the faces of the army and navy. If they were afraid to do this, however, they need not look for a captain, for she would fill her apron with dynamite and lead them along the avenues of the city where the rich reside, destroying as they went.
“Her husband advised his hearers to study chemistry and take lessons from those expert in the manufacture of deadly explosives.”—Extract from a newspaper report of a meeting of “the dynamite section” of the Chicago socialists, Feb. 22, 1885.
IV.
ATHEISM, COMMUNISM, AND ANARCHY.
The “New England Anzeiger” of March 14, 1885, appeared with a first page framed in gory red, and containing lurid accounts of the revolutions of March 14, 1848, in Vienna; of March 18, 1848, in Berlin; of March 18, 1871, in Paris; and of the assassination of the Czar of Russia, March 13, 1881. The following extract shows the tone of the article:—
“The dead of the 14th of March were buried, and with them the revolution; for everything that then happened in Berlin—yes, in all Germany—proved the political immaturity of the people; and the friend of humanity looks on in sadness to think how much good might have been accomplished in the year 1848 if the people had known what they know to-day,—to-day, when all the countries of Europe have behind them the powerful and deep-seated labor movement of more than twenty years, and when the principles of atheism, communism, and anarchy are daily and hourly, in the hut and in the palace (in the former with enthusiasm, in the latter with anxiety), considered and pondered over.”