Life of Albert Parsons

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least two cases men were fired on and killed when they were running away, and there was consequently no occasion to shoot, yet nobody was punished; that in Chicago there had been a number of strikes in which some of the police not only took sides against the men, but without any authority of law invaded and broke up peaceable meetings, and in scores of cases brutally dubbed people who were guilty of no offense whatever. Reference is made to the opinion of the late Judge McAllister, in the case of the Harmonia Association of Joiners against Brenan, et at., reported in the Chicago Legal News. Among other things, Judge McAllister says:

"The facts established by a large number of witnesses, and without any opposing evidence, are, that this society, having leased Turner Hall, on West Twelfth street, for the purpose, held a meeting in the forenoon of said day, in said hall, composed of from 200 to 3OO individuals, most of whom were journeymen cabinet-makers engaged in the several branches of the manufacture of furniture in Chicago, but some of those in attendance were the proprietors in that business, or the delegates sent by them. The object of the meeting was to obtain a conference of the journeymen with such proprietors, or their authorized delegates, with the view of endeavoring to secure an increase of the price or diminution of the hours of labor. The attendants were wholly unarmed, and the meeting was perfectly peaceable and orderly, and while the people were sitting quietly, with their backs toward the entrance hall, with a few persons on the stage in front of them, and all engaged merely in the business for which they had assembled, a force of from fifteen to twenty policemen came suddenly into the hall, having a policeman's club in one hand and a revolver in the other, and making no pause to determine the actual character of the meeting, they immediately shouted: 'Get out of here, you damned sons-of-bitches,' and began beating the people with their clubs, and some of them actually firing their revolvers. One young man was shot through the back of the head and killed. But to complete the atrocity of the affair on the part of the officers engaged in it, when the people hastened to make their escape from the assembly room, they found policemen stationed on either side of the stairway leading from the hall down to the street, who applied their clubs to them as they passed, seemingly with all the violence practicable under the circumstances.

"Mr. Jacob Beiersdorf, who was a manufacturer of furniture, employing some 200 men, had been invited to the meeting and came, but as he was about to enter the place where it was held, an inoffensive old man, doing nothing unlawful, was stricken down at his feet by a policeman's dub.

"These general facts were established by an overwhelming mass of testimony, and for the purpose of the questions in the case, it is needless to go the popular will as regulated by law, is the right of suffrage, but to that right two others are auxiliary and of almost equal importance:

"The chief political right of the citizen in our government, based upon