The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest: The writings of philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have voiced the struggle against social injustice; selected from twenty-five languages; covering a period of five thousand years
General
The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest: The writings of philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have voiced the struggle against social injustice; selected from twenty-five languages; covering a period of five thousand years
Social justice; Social problems
life into the attempt, at the cost of his own life, to protest
against the wrongs of his fellow-men, is a saint compared to
the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even
if his protest destroys other lives besides his own. Let him
who is without sin in society cast the first stone at such an
one.
The Bomb
BY FRANK HARRIS
(The English author, born 1855, author of "The Man Shakespeare," has
in this novel told the inside story of the Haymarket explosion in
Chicago in 1886. The following passage describes the treatment which
the strikers received from the police)
A meeting was called on a waste space in Packingtown, and
over a thousand workmen came together. I went there out of
curiosity. Lingg, I may say here, always went alone to these
strike meetings. Ida told me once that he suffered so much at
them that he could not bear to be seen, and perhaps that was
the explanation of his solitary ways. Fielden, the Englishman,
spoke first, and was cheered to the echo; the workmen knew
him as a working-man and liked him; besides, he talked in a
homely way, and was easy to understand. Spies spoke in German
and was cheered also. The meeting was perfectly orderly
when three hundred police tried to disperse it. The action
was ill-advised, to say the best of it, and tyrannical; the
strikers were hurting no one and interfering with no one.
Without warning or reason the police tried to push their way
through the crowd to the speakers; finding a sort of passive
resistance and not being able to overcome it, they used their
clubs savagely. One or two of the strikers, hot-headed, bared
their knives, and at once the police, led on by that madman,
Schaack, drew their revolvers and fired. It looked as if the
police had been waiting for the opportunity. Three strikers
were shot dead on the spot, and more than twenty were wounded,
several of them dangerously, before the mob drew sullenly away
from the horrible place. A leader, a word, and not one of the
police would have escaped alive; but the leader was not there,
and the word was not given, so the wrong was done, and went
unpunished.
I do not know how I reached my room that afternoon. The sight
of the dead men lying stark there in the snow had excited me to
madness. The picture of one man followed me like an obsession;
he was wounded to death, shot through the lungs; he lifted
himself up on his left hand and shook the right at the police,
crying in a sort of frenzy till the spouting blood choked him--
"Bestien! Bestien!" ("Beasts! Beasts!")
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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