"A lot of people went to the jail one night, a thousand, maybe. They hooted, they cat-called, and they hissed. Is it any wonder they did? Ladies and gentlemen, I want to tell you there is no surer verdict on earth than the verdict of a crowd; and the verdict of that crowd condemned what the deputies had done.
"Finally they say there was a conspiracy on the 5th of November to go to Everett and to hold their meeting at all hazard, to brook no opposition, to ride rough-shod over it, to oppose everyone and anything that stood in the way of accomplishing their purpose. I ask you to think just for a moment how foreign that is to everything you know about the I. W. W. and their operations and behavior in Everett. Not one witness for the state could tell you an incident where one of them resisted arrest, could tell you an occasion where one of them had advocated violence, could tell you one occasion where any one of them had committed any acts of violence.
"These people wrote to Governor Lister calling his attention to the violations of the law on the part of the officers of Everett; they wrote to Mayor Merrill, enclosing a copy of that letter and calling on him to restore the order that had been violated by the officers of the law; they scattered handbills all over Everett, among its best homes and in its business streets, calling upon the good citizens to come to their meeting on November 5th at Wetmore and Hewitt, to come and help maintain your own and our constitutional privileges; they mailed to the citizens of Everett on October 30th, seven or eight hundred copies of a little pamphlet calling upon them to intervene and stop the brutality of officers of the law; they questioned Governor Lister at a public meeting and again called his attention to the conditions in Everett; they called in the reporters, called the newspapers and notified the editors that they were going to Everett and asked them to have representatives present: Are these the acts of conspirators?
"You know how that meeting was called and why it was called. You know it from ministers of the gospel, you know it from the lips of those whom you cannot help but believe. And it was called for Sunday, the day when people ordinarily resent disorders of the kind that had occurred there. It was called for the daytime, when ordinarily abuse and violence are not attempted. And this big crowd went up there on this fine Sunday afternoon because in number there is strength and in numbers there is protection against brutality.
"At first the deputies had taken out one or two and abused and beaten them; then they had taken five or six; they had taken eighteen; finally they had taken forty-one. But I ask you, would you believe it possible that they could take two hundred or three hundred people in broad daylight and do to them what had been done to the others? Yet the evidence in this case shows convincingly and conclusively they intended to do substantially that thing. They intended to run those men into a warehouse; they didn't intend to let one of them get away. And had they gotten them into that warehouse you don't know, I don't know, nobody knows what would have happened!
"That is the evidence of conspiracy in this case. They have claimed no other conspiracy; they have offered no other evidence of conspiracy, either to set fires or to incite violence, or to override all opposition on November 5th. Their evidence doesn't stand even if unanswered—and no evidence could be more successfully answered.
"What evidence is there that Tom Tracy had anything to do with such a conspiracy, if there were one? Their most willing tools, Auspos and Reese, don't say a word about Tracy.
"What does the identification by McRae amount to? He identifies Tracy as the man who leaned out of the window and shot at him. Now at the time this shot was fired McRae had his back turned to the man who shot it. He says himself he did, and he was shot thru the heel, which seems to prove it. That, by the way, suggests to me that it was not an I. W. W. who shot McRae. The man who shot him must have thought McRae a hero, like the gentleman of mythological fame who was killed by an arrow thru the heel which no I. W. W. does, I assure you. Or else he thought that McRae wore his brains there.
"But I am not going to discuss McRae at great length either now or at any other stage of this case, because the greatest kindness I can do him is to forget him. The man is a perjurer! He lied! He was not mistaken. He deliberately, cold-bloodedly lied about almost everything in this case wherein his conduct as an officer was questioned. He lied about 'Sergeant' Keenan! He lied about shooting at the "Wanderer," and you saw the bullet holes. He lied about Berg and about Mitten, and finally, and last of all lied, and we have proven it conclusively, about being out to Beverly Park.
"Bridge's identification of Tracy does not agree with that of Smith, and Bridge does not even agree with his own testimony given at the coroner's inquest. Smith picked out a photograph and said it was Tracy and that picture resembles Tracy about as much as I do some of you jurors. Bridge and Smith say that Tracy fired three shots, and Hogan says he fired only one. And you know, ladies and gentlemen, that Hogan did not see this man at all. You know that he did not even see the window at which he pretends this man was sitting when the shot was fired. You know it because you went there to the dock and you saw the boat lined up to a mathematical certainty by the shot marks, and you saw a photograph taken with the camera placed by John Hogan exactly where he said he was standing himself. And there wasn't a one of you who could identify Bob Mills, with his long nose and angular features, with everything that makes identification easy, when he was in the position attributed to Tracy. And when you came around from there to where you could look directly at the place, the reflected glare of the sunshine left nothing but a blank background.