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alderman three times, for congress twice, and once each for sheriff and county clerk. At the national convention of the socialistic labor party, held at Allegheny, Pa., in 1879, he was nominated as the candidate for president of the United States. At the time of his voluntary surrender to the court he was editor of the Alarm."
"Will you give his disposition and any proof of his aversion to violence or any words cautioning others against inflicting injury to persons or property?"
"A.R. Parsons is a philosophical anarchist and claims the gift of prophecy. He has never counseled revolution, but has prophesied revolution. In the prophetic words addressed to Mr. T.V. Powderly from the Chicago bastile, July 4, 1886, he said:
"Whether we live or whether we die the social revolution is inevitable. The boundaries of human freedom must be enlarged and widened. The seventeenth century was a struggle for religious liberty; the eighteenth for political equality, and in the nineteenth century mankind is demanding economic or industrial freedom. The fruition of this struggle means the social revolution. We see it coming; we predict it; we hail it with joy. Are we criminals for that?' "
"As I am myself an old time, original Jeffersonian democrat, believing that lal power where not expressly delegated to the state, is inherently in the people and not in corporations, and that the ballots is the sole and final arbiter of any existing grievances, I frequently expostulated with him on the idea involved in the word anarchy. His invariable reply to me, with the bars between him us and the shadow of the scaffold impending above him, was:
"I am not a revolutionist, for all revolutions are not made my agitators and prophets. They are the creatures of wrongs inflicted by the privileged few and theirs tools and agencies, the law-maker, the courts, and the executive force whether a pliant proletarian guard called police, or the new organized reserves of the police, known as our militia. I do not seek to make revolution. We simply see it coming; we predict it. Am I a criminal for that? Who dreamed among the masses of events of 1861-5? I now prophesy the downfall of wage slavery or the wage-slavery system and its replacement by the principle of co-operation and association between labor and capital. As I witnessed the overthrow of chattel slavery and now
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