It was all very simple, too. If it were not for the tragedy, and the wrong that is so much worse than any tragedy, one might almost laugh at the simplicity. It shows the power of words, the force of phrases, the obdurate and terrible tyranny of a term. The men who had been hanged were called anarchists, when, as it happens, they were men, just men. And out of that original error in terminology there was evolved that overmastering fear which raved and slew in a frenzy of passion that decades hence will puzzle the psychologist who studies the mind of the crowd. And the student of ethics will find in the event another proof of the inerrancy and power of that old law of moral action and reaction, according to which hatred ceaseth not by hatred, but by love alone. It may be found stated accurately and simply in the Sermon on the Mount, and there is still hope that Christendom, after another thousand years or so, may discover it, and drawing therefrom the law of social relations, apply it to human affairs, and so solve the problems that trouble and perplex mankind. VII In speaking of the group of newspaper writers who formed the Whitechapel Club, augmented as they were by artists, and musicians and physicians and lawyers, I would not give the impression that they were in any sense reformers, or actuated by the smug and forbidding spirit which too often inspires that species. They were, indeed, wisely otherwise, and they were, I think, wholly right minded in their attitude toward what are called public questions, and of these they had a deep and perspicacious understanding, and it will be easy to imagine that the cursory comments on passing phases of the human spectacle of such minds as those of Charles Goodyear Seymour, Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Ben King, Opie Reed, Alfred Henry Lewis, and his brother William E. Lewis, Frederick Upham Adams, Thomas E. Powers, Horace Taylor, Wallace Rice, Arthur Henry, and a score of others were apt to be entertaining and instructive, though they were uttered with such wit and humor that they were never intended to be instructive. The club had been founded late in the eighties, and although it endured less than ten years, it still lives in the minds of newspaper and literary men as one of the most remarkable of Bohemian clubs. It had its rooms in the rear of a little saloon, conducted by Henry Koster in “newspaper alley,” as Calhoun Place was more generally called, near the buildings of the _Chicago News_ and the _Chicago Herald_, and it somehow gathered to itself many of the clever men of Chicago who were writing for the press, and a few intimate spirits in other lines of work, but of sympathetic spirit. For a while the club was nameless, but one afternoon a group were sitting in one of the rooms when a newsboy passed through the alley and cried: “All about the latest Whitechapel murder!” Seymour paused with a stein of beer half lifted, and said: “We’ll call the new club the ‘Whitechapel Club.’”