Life of Albert Parsons

the world by the sprinkling of rose oil," said Mirabeau, and history proves that he was right. In no age did the rulers and despoilers of our race relinquish their hold upon the throat of their victims, until forced t<r-by logic and argument? No......Blood, the precious sap, was ever the price of liberty.

My years of childhood were pleasant. I played and studied-how different from the childhood of the offsprings of the average workingman in this "glorious, civilized and-according to Grinnell-enlightened country." The children of the proletaire have no youth; the spring of life has no sunshine, no blossoms, no flowers for them! If there is a discernible object in their existence it is that of serving to make life happy and pleasant for those who tread upon them.

In my native land children must attend school daily from the age of 6 to that of 14; every child in that "Barbarian country" is thus compelled to attend school for 8 years, and cannot therefore be "utilized and made to pay" by either their parents or factory lords.

In this enlightened country the children of the wage-workers do not attend school in the average more than two years; they learn just enough to serve as a piece of organic machinery, and as such they are "let out" to benevolent and Christian employers in their tenderest years. Their vitality, which is needed for their own bodily and intellectual development, is in such wise tapped from the innocents and turned into gold for our "law and order" loving respectable citizens. They die from consumption before they attain their maturity, or resort to whisky, thinking thereby to restore their lost vigor. If they escape early destruction, their life is generally terminated in one of those charitable or reformatory institutes known as the insane asylum, the penitentiary, or poorhouse.

But woe to the wretch who condemns this order of things! He is an "enemy of civilization," and "society must protect itself against such criminals."....... There comes the star-spangled Mephisto, Bonfield. with his noble guards of "Liberty"; there comes the savior of the State, Grinnell. With the visage of a Sicilian brigand; there comes the hireling juror. and there comes the vast horde of social vultures: Unisono is the anathema! Unisono is the cry — "To the gallows!"

"Society" is saved and "Liberty and order"-of the policeman's club-triumph! Selah!

I do not intend to say that the condition of the wageworkers in Germany is better than in this country, but I will say that I never saw there such real suffering from want as I have seen in this country. And there is more protection for women and children in Germany than here.

I was educated for a career in the government service (forest branch). As a child I had private tutors, and later visited the Polytechnicum in Cassel. At the age of seventeen my father died suddenly, leaving a large family in