Yes, they might well protest, said the speaker; nowhere
on all the bloody pages of history could you find
a crime more revolting than this! The masters
of Europe had gone mad in their lust for power; they
had called down the vengeance of mankind upon their
crowned and coronetted heads. Here to-night he
would tell them—and the speaker’s
hoarse and raucous voice mounted to a shout of rage—he
would tell them that in signing the death-warrant of
those heroic martyrs, they had sealed the doom of
their own order, they had torn out the foundation-stones
from the structure of capitalist society! The
speaker’s voice seemed to lift the audience from
its seats, and the last words of the sentence were
drowned in a tumult of applause.
Silence fell again, and the man went on. He had
peculiar mannerisms on the platform. His lanky
form was never still for an instant. He hurried
from one end of the stage to the other; he would crouch
and bend as if he were going to spring upon the audience,
a long, skinny finger would be shaken before their
faces, or pointed as if to drive his words into their
hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram,
sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew
nothing about the man or his cause, you would find
this repellent and shocking. You had to know
what his life had been—an unceasing conflict
with oppression; he had got his Socialist education
in jail, where he had been sent for trying to organize
the wage-slaves of a gigantic corporation. His
rage was the rage of a tender-hearted poet, a lover
of children and of Nature, driven mad by the sight
of torment wantonly inflicted. And if ever he
had seemed to you an extremist, too angry to be excused,
here to-night he had his vindication, here to-night
you saw him as a prophet. For now the master-class
had torn the mask from its face, and revealed to the
whole world what were its moral standards! At
last men saw their rulers face to face!
They have plunged mankind into a pit of lunacy.
“They call it war,” cried the speaker;
“but I call it murder.” And he went
on to picture to them what was happening in Europe
at that hour—he brought the awful nightmare
before their eyes, he showed them homes blown to pieces,
cities given to the flames, the bodies of men pierced
by bullets or torn to fragments by shells. He
pictured a bayonet plunged into the abdomen of a man;
he made you see the ghastly deed, and feel its shuddering
wickedness. Men and women and children sat spellbound;
and for once no man could say aloud or feel in his
heart that the pictures of a Socialist agitator were
overdrawn—no, not even Ashton Chalmers,
president of the First National Bank of Leesville,
or old Abel Granitch, proprietor of the Empire Machine
Shops!
V
Copyrights
Jimmie Higgins from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
