Once more we reach the anniversary of the martyrdom of Albert Parsons, Louis Lingg, George Engel, Adolph Fisher, and August Spies. Though dead, their silence is today more powerful than the voices strangled November 11th, 1887.
By the murder of these five leaders of the people, the plutocrats thought to ensure their safety; instead they dug their grave. The world is gradually learning the true history and significance of this crime of crimes. Even now the boastful assertion of the daily press, that “Anarchy is dead” is heard no more. Instead comes the cry for repression to curb its rapid spread! All the powers of governmental despotism are to be invoked. Fools! Did they think they could annihilate principles by strangling the men who advocated them? Did not Parsons tell them: “Men die, but principles live”?
Let us remember the Eleventh of November, and forget not the brave souls who, on this day, sealed with their lives the devotion to the grand principles of human freedom.
These men were martyrs. They died because they preached a better condition for humanity. They were foully murdered by the ruling classes—because they dared to oppose the infamous gang of thieves who live upon the industry of the toiling millions—the working bees of the human hive. Their lips are forever closed. Hushed are their voices in the eternal silence of the grave, but the grand principles they taught, the great truths they told, still live. Amid the silence and solitude of the earth they sleep the sleep that knows no awakening. But the voices that were strangled that day of martyrdom have worked a revolution which nothing can successfully oppose. Their death was the real beginning of the Anarchist propaganda in America. And on this day were born immortal souls that will lead the van of human progress down the corridors of the future, until their monument will rise in the realisation of the principles for which they died.