Let Justice Be Done

I am not going to cry for bloody vengeance, for Carlo Tresca has been revenged more than a hundredfold by the universal chorus of maledictions heaped upon his assassins and the equally tremendous praise directed at his life and memory. But I am going to add my shout to the tumultuous uproar that demands justice and will not be denied, even if some sacred ikons must be toppled from their pedestals and a few pillars of our so called civilization must lie shattered in the dust of the ignominy.

"Fiat Justitia, pereat mundus." Let justice be done even though the world perish! For, indeed, the blood of martyrs is not only the seed of saints; it is also the dragon teeth of social protest, the harbinger and forerunner of mighty upheavals.

Who had any reason to have Carlo murdered? I do not know their names, but there must have been more than a few throughout the world who caressed the hilt of the stiletto and the butt of the pistol at every mention of his name. And who wished Carlo a long and vigorous life, joy, happiness, and a glorious and heroic death, instead of a somber and tragic one? Millions of men and women who had learned to honor and love him even though they had never seen him and heard but little of his almost legendary exploits in the cause of liberty. For this man was everybody's friend, tutor, and counselor; he really loved everybody from the derelict and the destitute up to the teacher, the healer, even the man of affairs. He stood staunchly with his spiritual sword unsheathed before every haunted human being- aye, even the thief, the harlot, the gangster, even those he pursued relentlessly until they were discomfited and confounded.

He was a friend of the policeman who arrested him scores of times, of the District Attorney who denounced him as an enemy of society but ate and drank at his table. The jailer who locked him up for interminable days, a friend of everybody but the sinner against the Holy Ghost, the confirmed and ruthless enemy of democracy and equality. Yea, even now he would plead for mercy for is own slayers as Jesus did, although, unlike Jesus, he had no lasting judgment to dispense in the hereafter.

He liked to call himself an Anarchist, and if that term connotes a man who is absolutely free, then he was an Anarchist; but from the point of view of pure doctrine he was all things to all men and in his endless intellectual vagabondage he never really sought any definite anchorage or moorings.

Who could have hired an unconscionable assassin to murder such a man in the dark of night, in a deserted street, while he was going peacefully back to his home and his own? Who fired the shots in the back of such a man's head, fearing that if he faced the lightning of his eyes, tempered by the angelic beauty of his smile, he must become frozen and petrified in his tracks?

Alas, I do not know! Does anyone know? Let this booklet speak.

Arturo Giovanniri