“As to Lingg, he came from that republic sitting in the center of Europe preaching the everlasting lesson of liberty. He came here in the fall of 1885, and became a member of the Seliger household. Whatever he knows of social and labor conditions in this country he learned from those about him. He joined a carpenters’ union, being himself a carpenter by trade. He attended the meetings of that union. Young, active, bright, capable, he enters the band of which they speak, and manufactures bombs. There is no law against that, gentlemen; but they claim that is a circumstance from which you must draw the conclusion of his guilt, when taken with other circumstances, for the Haymarket tragedy. The State put on the stand one man, Lehman, to whom he gave bombs. Did he tell Lehman to go to the Haymarket and use the bombs there? No. Lehman swears that he said: ‘You take these and put them in a safe place.’ And Lehman hid them where the officer, piloted by him, found them. Does that prove that Lingg sent a bomb to the Haymarket for the purpose of having somebody killed? How did he come to make bombs? Was it a matter to engage in on his own volition or responsibility? No. The Carpenters’ Union at one of its meetings resolved to devote a certain amount of money for the purpose of experimenting with dynamite. You may say that was not right, but he was not responsible for it. There is no more reason in holding him responsible for the Haymarket affair on account of his experiments than there is to hold every other member of the Carpenters’ Union for the same thing. That is how Lingg came to make bombs. Without dynamite a bomb-shell is a toy. The Lingg bombs would kill nobody unless some human independent agency took hold of them. Did Lingg know on Monday night that one of his bombs was to be used? He could not have known it, because the testimony is incontrovertible that it was understood by the men who met at 54 West Lake Street there should be no violence at the Haymarket meeting. And yet the State asks you to say that Lingg shall be hanged because he manufactured bombs. The man who threw the bomb did the independent act necessary for its explosion. Who was that man? Was he connected with the defendants? The evidence does not show it.
“And a word more about that. This boy Lingg was dependent upon others as to his impressions of our institutions. He went to Seliger’s house. Seliger is a Socialist; he has been in this country for years. He is thirty-one years of age; Lingg is twenty-one. And yet the great State of Illinois, through its legal representatives, bargains with William Seliger, the man of mature years, and with his wife, older even than himself, that if they will do what they can to put the noose around the neck of this boy they shall go scatheless! Ah! gentlemen, what a mockery of justice is this.”
Proceeding to discuss the Haymarket meeting, he held that there was no law that could take away the right of the people to meet and consider grievances. When it was proposed to adopt the Constitution, in 1787, the States were so careful to preserve the rights of the people that several amendments were put in. Capt. Black spoke of our forefathers, who had made the name of the revolutionist immortal, and referred to the meetings that had to be held as a preliminary to the great struggle. It had been charged against these men that they were guilty of misdemeanors for holding meetings, and they had been prosecuted for crimes. Before the Constitution could receive the approbation of the States, it had been necessary that the amendment providing that no laws should be passed by Congress abridging free speech should be inserted. Such a provision had been incorporated in the first Constitution of Illinois in 1818, and renewed in the subsequent Constitutions of 1848 and 1870. The Haymarket meeting had been called for the common good. Those men believed that a great wrong had been done, a great outrage committed, and the rights of the citizens in that assemblage had been invaded by an unlawful, unwarrantable and outrageous act.
“Bonfield, in his police office, surrounded by his minions, one hundred and eighty strong, armed to the teeth, knew that the meeting was quietly and peacefully coming to its close. Nay, he had said so to Carter Harrison. When Parsons had concluded, Mayor Harrison went to the station and told Bonfield that it was a quiet meeting, and Bonfield replied, ‘My detectives make me the same report.’ Yet Carter Harrison did not get out of hearing before Inspector Bonfield ordered his men to fall in for that death march. Who is responsible for it? Who precipitated that conflict? Who made that battle in that street that night? The law looks at the approximate cause, not the remote. The law looks at the man immediately in fault; not at some man who may have manufactured the pistol that does the shooting, the dynamite that kills, the bomb that explodes. I ask you, upon your oath before God, in a full and honest consideration of this entire testimony, who made the Haymarket massacre? Who is responsible for that collision? If Bonfield had not marched there, would there have been any death? Would not that meeting have dissolved precisely as it proposed to do? Did the bomb-thrower go down to the station where the police were and attack them? A bomb could have been thrown into that station with even more deadly effect than at the Haymarket itself. There they were, massed together in close quarters, in hiding, like a wild beast in its lair ready to spring. Did the bomb-thrower move upon them? Was there here a design to destroy? God sent that warning cloud into the heavens; these men were still there, speaking their last words; but a deadlier cloud was coming up behind this armed force. In disregard of our constitutional rights as citizens, it was proposed to order the dispersal of a peaceable meeting. Has it come to pass that under the Constitution of the United States and of this State, our meetings for the discussion of grievances are subject to be scattered to the winds at the breath of a petty police officer? Can they take into their hands the law? If so, that is Anarchy; nay, the chaos of constitutional right and legally guaranteed liberty. I ask you again, charging no legal responsibility here, but looking at the man who is morally at fault for the death harvest of that night, who brought it on? Would it have been but for the act of Bonfield?”
Captain Black went on to say that as long as the Mayor was there Bonfield could not act, but as soon as Harrison had gone the officer could not get to the Haymarket quick enough. The police, the speaker urged, had been searching the files of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the Alarm for years to put before the jury the most inflammatory articles. After alluding to Christ as the great Socialist of Judea, who first preached the Socialism taught by Spies and his other modern apostles, he compared John Brown and his attack on Harper’s Ferry to the Socialists’ attack on modern evils, concluding:
“Gentlemen, the last words for these eight lives. They are in your hands, with no power to whom you ace answerable but God and history, and I say to you in closing only the words of that Divine Socialist: ‘As ye would that others should do to you, do you even so to them.’”
CHAPTER XXXI.
Grinnell’s Closing Argument—One Step from Republicanism to Anarchy—A Fair Trial—The Law in the Case—The Detective Work—Gilmer and his Evidence—“We Knew all the Facts”—Treason and Murder—Arming the Anarchists—The Toy-shop Purchases—The Pinkerton Reports—“A Lot of Snakes”—The Meaning of the Black Flag—Symbols of the Social Revolution—The Daily News Interviews—Spies the “Second Washington”—The Rights of “Scabs”—The Chase into the River—Inflaming the Workingmen—The “Revenge” Lie—The Meeting at the Arbeiter-Zeitung Office—A Curious Fact about the Speakers at the Haymarket—The Invitation to Spies—Balthasar Rau and the Prisoners—Harrison at the Haymarket—The Significance of Fielden’s Wound—Witnesses’ Inconsistencies—The Omnipresent Parsons—The Meaning of the Manuscript Find—Standing between the Living and the Dead.