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
It is the first time in my life that I speak publicly in your
wonderful language, and the most solemn moment in my life. I
know not if I will go to the end of my remarks. The District
Attorney and the other gentlemen here who are used to measure
all human emotions with the yardstick may not understand the
tumult that is going on in my soul at this moment. But my
friends and my comrades before me, these gentlemen here who
have been with me for the last seven or eight months, know
exactly, and if my words will fail before I reach the end
of this short statement to you, it will be because of the
superabundance of sentiments that are flooding to my heart.
I speak to you not because I want to review this evidence at
all. I shall not enter into the evidence that has been offered
here, as I feel that you gentlemen of the jury have by this
time a firm and set conviction; by this time you ought to know,
you ought to have realized whether I said or whether I did
not say those words that have been put into my mouth by those
two detectives. You ought to know whether it is possible, not
for a man like me but for any living human being to say those
atrocious, those flagitious words that have been attributed to
me. I say only this in regard to the evidence that has been
introduced in this case, that if there is or ever has been
murder in the heart of any man that is in this courtroom today,
gentlemen of the jury, that man is not sitting in this cage.
We had come to Lawrence, as my noble comrade Mr. Ettor said,
because we were prompted by something higher and loftier than
what the District Attorney or any other man in this presence
here may understand and realize. Were I not afraid that I
was being somewhat sacrilegious, I would say that to go and
investigate into the motives that prompted and actuated us
to go into Lawrence would be the same as to inquire, why did
the Saviour come on earth, or why was Lloyd Garrison in this
very Commonwealth, in the city of Boston, dragged through the
streets with a rope around his neck? Why did all the other
great men and masters of thought--why did they go to preach
this new gospel of fraternity and brotherhood? It is just that
truth should be ascertained, it is right that the criminal
should be brought before the bar of justice. But one side
alone of our story has been told here. There has been brought
only one side of this great industrial question, the method
and the tactics. But what about, I say, the ethical part of
this question? What about the human and humane part of our
ideas? What about the grand condition of tomorrow as we see
it, and as we foretell it now to the workers at large, here
in this same cage where the felon has sat, in this same cage
where the drunkard, where the prostitute, where the hired
assassin has been? What about the better and nobler humanity
where there shall be no more slaves, where no man will ever
be obliged to go on strike in order to obtain fifty cents a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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