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movement which they advocated was but a means in their estimation toward the ends which they sought, and the movement itself was not primarily of any consideration at all. Now, your honor, I submit that you are sitting now in judgment, not alone upon my acts, but also upon my motives. Now, that is a dangerous thing for any man to do; any man is so liable to make a mistake in a matter of that kind. I claim that it would not be fair for you to assume to state what my motives were in the eight-hour movement, that I was simply using it for another purpose. How do you know that? Can you read my heart and order my actions? If you go by the record, the record will disprove your conjecture, because it is a conjecture! The State's Attorney has throughout this trial done precisely what Mr. English, the reporter of the Tribune, said he was instructed to do by the proprietor of the Tribune, when he attended labor meetings. It was the custom of the head editors of the large dailies to instruct those who went to these labor meetings to report only the inflammatory and inciting passages of the speaker's remarks at the meetings. That is precisely the scheme laid out by the prosecution. They have presented you here with copies of the Alarm running back for three years and my speeches covering three years back. They have selected such portions of those articles, and such articles, mark you, as subserve their purpose, such as they supposed would be calculated to inflame your mind and prejudice you and the jury against us. You ought to be careful of this thing.
It is not fair, and it is not right for you to conclude that, from the showing made by these gentlemen, we were not what we pretended to be in this labor movment. Take the record. Why, I am well known throughout the United States for years and years past—my name is—and I have come in personal contact with hundreds of thousands of workers from Nebraska in the West to New York in the East, and from Maryland to Wisconsin and Minnesota. I have traversed the States for the past ten years, and I am known by hundreds of thousands who have seen and heard me. Possibly I had better stop a little, just a moment here, and explain how this was. These organizations sent for me. Sometimes it was the Knights of Labor, sometimes it was the trade unions, sometimes
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