“What is your name?” I asked him.
“Lingg,” curtly replied the prisoner.
“Ah, yes; but how do you spell it?”
“L-i-n-gg,” came the spelling.
“Yes; but give us your full name.”
“It is Louis or Ludwig Lingg. I am twenty-one years and eight months old.”
He was asked a great many questions. Some he refused to answer, and others he answered promptly and with pleasure, especially when they touched on killing capitalists and capitalistic editors, as he called them. He had no use, he said, for these people, and thought that if they could be taken away suddenly the world would be satisfied and happy. He remarked that he did not blame the police very much, because they were workingmen themselves, but there was one officer, he said, that he perfectly despised. It was John Bonfield. If he could have blown him to atoms, he thought, he might become reconciled to a great many things as they then existed. He finally gave to me and to Assistant State’s Attorney Furthmann, in the presence of Officers Stift, Rehm, Loewenstein, Schuettler and Hoffman, a brief account of himself and his movements, but he said that he would rather die than give information against any one. He did not deny what others had stated about him, but further he would not go. He was informed by Mr. Furthmann how strict the law was against conspiracies, but the only answer he vouchsafed was that the laws would not remain in force much longer; that the working people would make laws to suit themselves, and they would not allow any higher power to dictate to them. For his own part, he could work and was willing to work, he said, but he wanted his share of the profits. He thought the police had made fools of themselves in the movement the Anarchists had inaugurated. If they had only known enough, he said, to have held back, the capitalists would have been forced to submit; but now the police had spoiled their own chances for gain for years to come. They would be sorry for it, he added. If the Anarchists had won in Chicago, he further stated, all the other large cities would have fallen into line, and wretchedness and poverty would have been banished forever.
IRON BOLT FOUND IN LINGG’S TRUNK. From a Photograph.
Designed, according to Lingg’s own statement, to connect the halves of a composition bomb weighing twelve pounds. “The Haymarket bomb,” said he, “killed six. The one which I was going to make with that bolt would kill six dozen.” Four such bolts were found.