“But the confusion is only apparent. On closer analysis we find a logical thread running all through the seemingly devious course of the party, and a good reason for every one of its seemingly planless moves.” “The difficulties which beset the path of the Socialist Labor Party were extraordinary. As one of the first Socialist parties organized in this country on a national scale, it had to cope with the usual adversities which attend every radical movement at the outset of its career—weakness and diffidence in its own ranks, hostility and ridicule from the outside.” These were stirring times. The trade-union movement was entering upon a period of unprecedented activity. The Knights of Labor were in the ascendant and other labor unions were multiplying and rapidly increasing their membership. Everywhere the voice of the agitator was heard. In March, 1885, was inaugurated the strike of the Knights of Labor on the Gould Southwest Railway system, to be followed by the greater strike on the same system in 1886, which spread rapidly over the states of Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Kansas and Texas, and threatened to involve the railway traffic of all the western and southwestern states. It was one of the most notable labor strikes and brought the Knights of Labor conspicuously before the whole country. The Knights were finally beaten, although the fight was so stubbornly contested and the public was so thoroughly aroused that Congress was prevailed upon to investigate the trouble and the committee issued a detailed report in two parts, containing about eleven hundred pages. On May 1 of the same year the general strikes for the eight hour work day broke out in various parts of the country, involving several hundred thousand organized workers, most of whom met with disappointment and failure. The agitation carried on during this time for the shorter work day, known as the eight hour movement, culminated on May 4, 1886, in the Haymarket riots at Chicago, and the outrageous execution of the anarchists on November 11 of the following year, a foul blot on our capitalistic civilization that will remain to damn it forever. The murderous assaults upon peaceable meetings and the brutal clubbing of orderly workingmen by the police of Chicago at the behest of their political superiors, the tools of the capitalist class, goaded the leaders almost to desperation and led to the Haymarket massacre, a fiendish plot to silence the agitation and crush the movement for an eight hour work day which was spreading over the country; and, it must be confessed, it served for a time at least the malign purpose of the pretended supporters of “law and order.” But as certain as retributive justice pursues her course, the dragon’s teeth sown by the capitalist hand in the Haymarket tragedy, taking root in the blood of innocent workingmen, will yet spring from the pregnant soil of freedom to avenge the crimes of plutocratic tyranny and misrule.