Fielden next dwelt upon his treatment at the Central Station, and criticised the searching of houses without warrant. With reference to the trial he said:
“We claim that the foulest criminal that could have been picked up in the slums of any city of Christendom, or outside of it, would never have been convicted on such testimony as has been brought in here, if he had not been a dangerous man in the opinion of the privileged classes. We claim that we are convicted, not because we have committed murder. We are convicted because we were very energetic in advocacy of the rights of labor. I call your attention to a very significant fact—that on this day, at this time when the sentence of death is going to be passed on us, the Stock-yards employers have notified their employés that they will be required to work ten hours next Monday or they will shut down. I think it is a logical conclusion to draw that these men think they have got a dangerous element out of the way now, and they can return again to the ten-hour system. I know that I had considerable to do with the eight-hour question, although I only spoke once in that neighborhood, every man there being a stranger to me—but I went down there in March previous and made an eight hour speech and formed the nucleus of an eight-hour organization there, and the Stock-yards succeeded in starting the eight-hour system, though they have not been able to keep it up in its entirety. We claim that we have done much.”
He predicted that it would be a grand day when everybody adopted Socialism, and then touched on his own case, denying that he had entered into a conspiracy. Fischer, Lingg and Engel, he said, were men with whom he had not associated for a year, and therefore, he maintained, he could not have been conspiring with them. He had never, he said, seen a dynamite bomb till he saw one in the court-room, and had never known that dynamite was kept at the Arbeiter-Zeitung office. In concluding his speech Fielden said:
Your honor, I have worked at hard labor since I was eight years of age. I went into a cotton factory when I was eight years old, and I have worked continually since, and there has never been a time in my history that I could have been bought or paid into a single thing by any man or for any purpose which I did not believe to be true. To contradict the lie that was published in connection with the bill by the grand jury charging us with murder, I wish to say that I have never received one cent for agitating. When I have gone out of the city I have had my expenses paid. But often when I have gone into communities, when I would have to depend upon those communities for paying my way, I have often come back to this city with money out of pocket, which I had earned by hard labor, and I had to pay for the privilege of my agitation out of the little money I might have in my possession. To-day as the beautiful autumn sun kisses with balmy breeze the cheek of every free man, I stand here never to bathe my head in its rays again. I have loved my fellow-men as I have loved myself. I have hated trickery, dishonesty and injustice. The nineteenth century commits the crime of killing its best friend. It will live to repent of it. But, as I have said before, if it will do any good, I freely give myself up. I trust the time will come when there will be a better understanding, more intelligence, and above the mountains of iniquity, wrong and corruption, I hope the sun of righteousness and truth and justice will come to bathe in its balmy light an emancipated world.”
Albert R. Parsons consumed a great deal of time in the delivery of his speech. He began by declaring that the trial had been conducted with “passion, heat and anger,” and pronounced the verdict as one of “passion, born in passion, nurtured in passion, and the sum totality of the organized passion of the city of Chicago.” For that reason he asked for a suspension of sentence and a new trial. He said:
“Now, I stand here as one of the people, a common man, a workingman, one of the masses, and I ask you to give ear to what I have to say. You stand as a bulwark; you are as a brake between them and us. You are here as the representative of justice, holding the poised scales in your hands. You are expected to look neither to the right nor to the left, but to that by which justice, and justice alone, shall be subserved. The conviction of a man, your honor, does not necessarily prove that he is guilty. Your law-books are filled with instances where men have been carried to the scaffold and after their death it has been proven that their execution was a judicial murder. Now, what end can be subserved in hurrying this matter through in the manner in which it has been done? Where are the ends of justice subserved, and where is truth found in hurrying seven human beings at the rate of express speed upon a fast train to the scaffold and an ignominious death? Why, if your honor please, the very method of our extermination, the deep damnation of its taking-off, appeals to your honor’s sense of justice, of rectitude, and of honor. A judge may also be an unjust man. Such things have been known.”
Parsons acknowledged being an Anarchist and proceeded to show the ends Anarchy sought. Then he asked:
“Now, what is this labor question which these gentlemen treat with such profound contempt, which these distinguished ‘honorable’ gentlemen would throttle and put to ignominious death, and hurry us like rats to our holes? What is it? You will pardon me if I exhibit some feeling? I have sat here for two months, and these men have poured their vituperations out upon my head, and I have not been permitted to utter a single word in my own defense. For two months they have poured their poison upon me and my colleagues. For two months they have sat here and spat like adders the vile poison of their tongues, and if men could have been placed in a mental inquisition and tortured to death, these men would have succeeded here now—vilified, misrepresented, held in loathsome contempt, without a chance to speak or contradict a word. Therefore, if I show emotion, it is because of this, and if my comrades and colleagues with me here have spoken in such strains as these, it is because of this. Pardon us. Look at it from the right standpoint. What is this labor question? It is not a question of emotion; the labor question is not a question of sentiment; it is not a religious matter; it is not a political problem; no, sir, it is a stern economic fact, a stubborn and immovable fact.”
He entered into a long explanation of the capitalistic system and pointed to the troubles experienced by the laboring classes under the present conditions. He spoke of capitalistic combinations and “corners,” touched on landlordism, discoursed on the eight-hour movement, and then reviewed some of the evidence against him. Referring to the Alarm, of which he had been editor, he said: