“This object is attained through the total extermination of all domination.
“Domination is personified in exploiters (Ausbeuter) and tyrants.
“The extermination of these, in view of their sources of power, can best be accomplished by means of dynamite.
“After such extermination the workingmen will organize according to their inclinations, for protection and consumption.
“Centralization—i. e., subordination of the different groups of production and consumption under a clique composed of individuals, or even under a majority of society—is not advisable, because in that way another domination would be established, and such would make illusory the stated purpose of free society—Anarchy.”
In writing this book I have endeavored at all times to be fair and honest. While I have done everything in my power and made use of every faculty which God has given me to ferret out and to combat Anarchy, and while I believe now, as I always have believed, that the men who suffered death at the hand of justice in the Cook County Jail deserved their fate, I also believe that there are those unhanged, and who probably never will be hanged, who are morally as guilty, and who deserve even a harsher fate than befell the men whose lives the law demanded. For these cowards—selfish, sneaking conspirators as they are, who fight from ambush and take no risks—would not deserve even the sympathy of the poor fools whom they lead to ruin. I firmly believe that Engel, Lingg and Fischer were at least sincere in their convictions and honest in their belief and in their expressions. Spies, I think, was led to his fate by vanity and a consuming desire for notoriety.
In my investigations I of course looked carefully into the antecedents of all the Anarchists who were arrested by my command, and I will say right here that not a dishonest act, as regards the rights of property, was laid to the door of any one of them. Lingg, particularly, was scrupulously honest and conscientious in his dealings with his fellow-man. The day after the Haymarket massacre he found himself penniless, and for that reason refused at first to partake of the food offered him at Seliger’s table.
“I cannot partake of what belongs to you and your wife,” he said, “nor of what I cannot pay for. You are as poor as I am.”
“You must share with us as long as we have food,” replied Seliger; but it was only after considerable urging that Lingg consented to appease his hunger.
While apparent bravery in facing death on the gallows counts for nothing—I have seen craven cowards meet their doom like stage heroes—I believe that Lingg, Engel and Fischer would have died calmly and bravely even without the stimulants which are always administered to the condemned before the fatal moment, and which were, of course, administered to the four men before they were led to the fatal trap which hurled them into eternity. Lingg, particularly, during the entire term of his confinement, through the long months of the trial, and up to the very day when he so tragically took his own life, showed a consistency and a determination which would have been heroic had he not been the dupe of designing men who saw in the ardor of his temperament and in the resistless force of his enthusiastic energy the means to further and carry out iniquitous plots with which they had not the courage to openly identify themselves. I repeat again, there are those still unhanged, who are even now parading before a credible public as apostles of the cause of labor, and whose cowardice keeps them out of the reach of law, who deserve the greater share of public odium. Some of these, and others like them, are still at work in our midst, and in the midst of all communities in which the revolutionists see a chance of making propaganda out of differences between employers and employed. I hope that one result of my book may be to open the eyes of honest workingmen to the fact that those who preach violence and those who stir up trouble and intensify discontent are the enemies of honest labor.