In an editorial on the trial, headed: The Press against Justice, the Chicago Times had this to say: "When it became evident that the rights and actions of E. V. Debs and his associates in the American Railway Union strike were to be reviewed in court this paper said editorially: "The Times appeals to its contemporaries and to the people to join with it in avoiding all clamor which may in the least degree influence the findings of the court or bring its proceedings into contempt." It appears that the appeal fell upon deaf ears. "Such papers as the Tribune and the Evening Journal seized upon the very first utterance of Mr. Debs' counsel as an opportunity for insidious effort to prejudice the court and the people against the cause of the labor leaders. "Two of the editorials and two of what it calls editorialettes were necessary to the Tribune yesterday in order to give its advice to the prosecuting lawyers and the court proper expression. The other organs of plutocracy though less lavish of editorial space, employed their news columns to the same end. The first strike of the allied newspapers is to pronounce the opening plea of the counsel for the defense, Mr. Erwin, in effect an assertion of the gospel of anarchy. "Overworked as it is by the bigoted press the word anarchy still serves as a more or less effective bogyman to frighten timid and ill-informed people, but no one who will read the reports of Mr. Erwin's address will find any anarchistic doctrines lurking therein. "He charged that Pullman and the railroad managers had conspired together against the interest of workingmen, that the manner of the conspiracy made resort to the law hopeless, that lawmakers could not or would not act, and under these conditions the men were justified in combining, resisting and refusing to work longer for Mr. Pullman or the roads allied with him. "The Times is unable to discern the savour of anarchy in that. It is in effect only a declaration that when employes combine to resist them, neither by direct statement or by innuendoes did the attorney suggest or excuse violence or the destruction of property. He erred, the Times thinks, in describing Pullman's course of procedure as illegal, for unhappily, law as it stands, protects Pullman in his most despotic and oppressive acts. If Pullman's course had been illegal, action at law instead of a strike and boycott would have been the remedy for it, but with the exception of this over-statement which may have been due to inadvertence, Mr. Erwin said nothing that men of fair and judicial minds can denounce as false, and nothing at all incendiary. The clamor of the conspiracy is raised to defeat justice."