The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America: From its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in ChicagoMcLean, George N.
History
The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America: From its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in Chicago
McLean, George N.
Anarchists -- United States; Haymarket Square Riot, Chicago, Ill., 1886
carried out to the full extent when I was found guilty. * * *
You smile. You perhaps think I will not use bombs any more,
but I tell you I die gladly upon the gallows in the sure hope
that hundreds and thousands of people to whom I have spoken
will now recognize and make use of dynamite. In this hope I
despise you, and I despise your laws. Hang me for it."
GEORGE ENGEL.
[Translated by Mr. Gauss.]
"When I left Germany in the year 1872 it was by reason of my
recognition of the fact that I could not support myself in the
future as it was the duty of a man to do. I recognized that I
could not make my living in Germany because the machinery and
the guilds of old no longer furnished me a guarantee to live.
I resolved to emigrate from Germany to the United States,
praised by many so highly. When I landed at Philadelphia,
on the 8th of January, 1873, my heart and my bosom expanded
with the expectation of living hereafter in that free country
which had been so often praised to me by so many emigrants,
and I resolved to be a good citizen of this country; and I
congratulated myself on having broken with Germany, where I
could have no longer made my living, and I think that my past
will show that, that which I resolved I intended to keep
faithfully. For the first time I stand before an American
court, and at that to be at once condemned to death. And what
are the causes that have preceded it, and have brought me
into this court? They are the same things that preceded my
leaving Germany, and the same causes that made me leave. I
have seen with my own eyes that in this free country, in this
richest country of the world, so to say, there are existing
proletarians who are pushed out of the order of society."
After explaining how his dissatisfaction with the existing order of
things led him to become a Socialist, Engel continued:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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