San Francisco turned out in a great preparedness parade on July 22. Someone threw a bomb into the ranks of the marchers. Nine people were killed. The next issue of _The Blast_ said substantially: “Well, they might have expected it,” and said actually: “To try to connect the Anarchists, the I. W. W., the Labor elements or the participants in the peace meeting with the bomb tragedy is stupid. The act was obviously the work of an individual who evidently sought to express his opposition to Preparedness for Slaughter by using the ammunition of Preparedness. Terrible as it is, it is merely a foretaste in miniature of what the people may expect multiplied a million times, from the Preparedness insanity.” When two men, Nolan and Tom Mooney, were arrested and charged with the crime, _The Blast_ rushed to their defense. When Warren Billings and Israel Weinberg were added to the list of accused, _The Blast_ ran sketches of the defendants by Minor, the staff artist. The case was of consuming interest to the anarchist group, and they rubbed their hands, in _The Blast_ office, over their good luck that it had happened right in their own little circle. _The Blast_ ceased firing random shots and focussed on the bomb case in salvos, followed the course of the trials, drew a parallel between the condition of the San Francisco suspects and that of Fielden, Neebe and Schwab, three of the anarchists who were implicated in the Haymarket bomb outrage in Chicago in 1886 and pardoned. The business of being an anarchist became surrounded with more and more difficulty as the year drew toward a close. Caplan, the fourth Los Angeles bomb suspect to be tried, was convicted and sentenced to ten years; a group of laborers who had engaged in violence in strikes against the United States Steel Corporation were under sentence in a Pittsburg prison; Carlo Tresca (whom we recall as a speaker at the Brescia Circle in 1915), and ten others were in jail in Duluth charged with murder in the I. W. W. strike on the Mesaba Iron range; the Magon brothers, two Mexican revolutionary anarchists, were in prison, and the days of _The Blast_ were numbered. Berkman came back to New York in the fall. While he was absent, _The Blast_ sputtered once more in its issue of January, 1917, with a venomous cartoon by Minor, and went out, for want of funds. [Illustration: Lieutenant A. R. Fish, Naval Intelligence]