However, the grand jury had to take hold of the matter—it
had no choice. It brought in a true bill, and
presently the case went to the county court.
The trial was a fine sensation. The prisoner
was the principal witness for the prosecution.
He gave a full account of the assassination; he furnished
even the minutest particulars: how he deposited
his keg of powder and laid his train—from
the house to such-and-such a spot; how George Ronalds
and Henry Hart came along just then, smoking, and
he borrowed Hart’s cigar and fired the train
with it, shouting, “Down with all slave-tyrants!”
and how Hart and Ronalds made no effort to capture
him, but ran away, and had never come forward to testify
yet.
But they had to testify now, and they did—and
pitiful it was to see how reluctant they were, and
how scared. The crowded house listened to Joyce’s
fearful tale with a profound and breathless interest,
and in a deep hush which was not broken till he broke
it himself, in concluding, with a roaring repetition
of his “Death to all slave-tyrants!”—which
came so unexpectedly and so startlingly that it made
everyone present catch his breath and gasp.
The trial was put in the paper, with biography and
large portrait, with other slanderous and insane pictures,
and the edition sold beyond imagination.
The execution of Joyce was a fine and picturesque
thing. It drew a vast crowd. Good places
in trees and seats on rail fences sold for half a
dollar apiece; lemonade and gingerbread-stands had
great prosperity. Joyce recited a furious and
fantastic and denunciatory speech on the scaffold
which had imposing passages of school-boy eloquence
in it, and gave him a reputation on the spot as an
orator, and his name, later, in the society’s
records, of the “Martyr Orator.”
He went to his death breathing slaughter and charging
his society to “avenge his murder.”
If he knew anything of human nature he knew that
to plenty of young fellows present in that great crowd
he was a grand hero—and enviably situated.
He was hanged. It was a mistake. Within
a month from his death the society which he had honored
had twenty new members, some of them earnest, determined
men. They did not court distinction in the same
way, but they celebrated his martyrdom. The crime
which had been obscure and despised had become lofty
and glorified.
Such things were happening all over the country.
Wild-brained martyrdom was succeeded by uprising
and organization. Then, in natural order, followed
riot, insurrection, and the wrack and restitutions
of war. It was bound to come, and it would naturally
come in that way. It has been the manner of
reform since the beginning of the world.
SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY
Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891.
Copyrights
What Is Man? and Other Essays from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
