The Memoirs of an American Citizen Part 10

"It is a dastardly crime against G.o.d and man! It threatens the very foundations of our free country--"

"Yes, that's all right," big John was growling in his heavy tone. "But we don't want to make too much fuss; it won't do no good to poke around in a nest of rattlers."

"Let them do their worst! Let them blow up this building! Let them dynamite my house! I should call myself a craven, a poltroon, if I wavered for one moment in my duty as a citizen."

Carmichael sighed and bit off the end of a fat cigar that he had been rolling to and fro in his mouth. He seemed to give his boss up, as you might a talkative schoolboy.

Henry Iverson Dround was a tall, dignified gentleman, with thick gray hair, close-cut gray whiskers, and a grizzled mustache. He always dressed much better than most business men of my acquaintance, with a sober good taste. The chief thing about him was his manners, which, for a packer, were polished. I knew that he had been to college: there was a tradition in the office that he had gone into the business against his will to please his father, who had begun life as a butcher in the good old way and couldn't understand his son's prejudices. Perhaps that explains why all the men in the house thought him haughty, and the other big packers were inclined to make fun of him. However that might be, Mr.

Dround had a high reputation in the city at large for honorable dealing and public spirit. There was little set afoot for the public good that Henry I. Dround did not have a hand in.

I had met the chief once or twice, big John having called his attention to me, but he never seemed to remember my existence. To-day Mr. Dround blew out of the manager's office pretty soon and brushed against my desk. Suddenly he stopped and addressed me in his thin, high voice:--

"What do you think, Mr. Harrington, of this infernal business?"

My answer was ready, pat, and sufficiently hot to please the boss. He turned to Carmichael, who had followed him.

"That is what young America is thinking!"

Carmichael put his tongue into his cheek instead of spitting out an oath; but after Mr. Dround had gone, he growled at me:--

"That's all right for young America, but I am no d.a.m.n fool, either! My father saw the riots back home in Dublin. It's no good sitting too close on the top of a chimney--maybe you'll set the house on fire. The police?

The police are half thieves and all blackguards! They got this up for a benefit party, most likely. Why, didn't they kill more'n twice as many men over at McCormick's only the other day, just because the boys were making a bit of a disturbance? And n.o.body said anything about it! What are they kicking for, anyway?"

Mr. Dround's view, however, was the one generally held. That very evening there was a meeting of the prominent men of the city to take counsel together how anarchy might be suppressed with a strong hand. We little people heard only rumors of what took place in that gathering, but it leaked out that there had been two minds among those wealthy and powerful men--the timid and the bold. The timid were overridden by the bolder-hearted. Good citizens, like Strauss and Vitzer, so Carmichael told me with a sneer, talked strong about encouraging the district attorney to do his duty, and raised a fund to pay for having justice done.

"It means that some of those rats the police have been ferreting out of the West Side saloons will hang to make them feel right. The swells are bringing pressure to bear, and some one must be punished. It's grand!"

He chuckled bitterly at his own wit. But the swells meant business, and when Henry I. Dround was drawn for the grand jury, to indict those anarchists that the police had already netted, big John swore:--

"He needn't have done that! There are plenty to do the fool things. It's his sense of duty, I s'pose, d.a.m.n him! It's some of his duty to come over here and help us make enough money to keep his old business afloat!"

The Irishman thought only of the business, but Henry I. Dround was not the man to let any personal interest stand in the way of what he considered his duty to society. Perhaps he was a little too proud of his sacrifices and his civic virtues. Some years later he told me all about that grand jury. All I need say here is that this famous trial of the anarchists was engineered from the beginning by prominent men to go straight.

The hatred and the rage of all kinds of men during those months while the anarchists were on our hands, before they were finally hanged or sent to prison, is hard to understand now at this distance from the event. That bomb in its murderous course had stirred our people to the depths of terror and hate: even easy-going hustlers like myself seemed to look at that time in the face of an awful fate. The pity of it all was--I say it now openly and advisedly--that our one motive was hate.

Stamp this thing out! that was the one cry. Few stopped to think of justice, and no one of mercy. We were afraid, and we hated.

Finally it came time for the trial; the _venire_ for the jury was issued. One night, to my consternation, I found a summons at the house.

When I showed it to a fellow-clerk at the office the next morning, he whistled:--

"I thought I saw the bailiff in here yesterday, looking around for likely men. They are after a safe jury this time, sure!"

I asked Carmichael to use his influence to get me excused, as I knew he usually did for the boys when they were summoned for jury duty. But all he said was:--

"You're a nervy youngster. You'd better do the thing, if you are accepted."

"It means weeks, maybe months, off," I objected.

"We'll make that all right: you won't lose nothing by it. But you mustn't mind finding a stick of dynamite under your bed when you go home after the trial," he grinned.

"I guess there's no trouble with my nerve," I said stiffly, thinking he was chaffing me. "But I don't want the job, all the same."

"Well, you'll have to see the old man this time. Maybe he can get you off."

So I went into Mr. Dround's private office and made my request. The chief asked me to take a chair and handed me a cigar. Then he began to talk about the privileges and duties of citizens.h.i.+p. From another man it might have been just s...o...b..r, but Henry I. Dround meant it, every word.

"Why don't you serve?" I asked him pretty bluntly.

He flushed.

"I haven't been drawn. Besides, it has been thought wiser not to give the jury too capitalistic a character. This is a young man's duty. And I understand from Mr. Carmichael that you are one of the most energetic and right-minded of our young men, Mr. Harrington."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From another man it might have been just s...o...b..r, but Henry I. Dround meant it, every word._]

He stood facing the window and talked along for some time in a general way. His talk was rather simple and condescending, but kind. He spoke of the future before me, of my having the right influence in the community.

When I left him I knew perfectly well that the house expected me to serve on that jury if I was chosen, and that Mr. Dround would take personally the warmest interest in a young man who had the courage to do his duty "in behalf of society," as he kept saying.

Still I hoped to escape. I was tolerably far down the list. So day after day I listened to the wrangle among the lawyers over the selection of the jurors. It was clear enough from the start that the State wanted only one kind of man on that jury--an intelligent, well-to-do clerk or small manufacturer. No laboring man need apply: his cla.s.s was suspect.

As a clerk in Steele's store said to me while we waited our turn:--

"That bailiff came into our place and walked down past our department with the manager. I heard him say to Mr. Bent: 'I'm running this case.

Let me tell you there won't be no hung jury.'"

"Do you want to serve?" I asked the man from Steele's.

"Well, I do and I don't." Then he leaned over and whispered into my ear: "It looks to me that there might be a better place for me at Steele's if everything goes off to suit and I am a part of it!" He nudged me and pulled a straight face. "I guess they ought to be hanged, all right," he added, as if to square himself with what he was ready to do.

After the defence had used up its challenges, which naturally was pretty soon, the real business of getting the jury began. Much the same thing happened in every case. First the man said he was prejudiced so that he couldn't render a fair verdict on the evidence. Then his Honor took him in hand and argued with him to convince him that his scruples were needless. His Honor drove him up and down hill until the man was forced to admit that he had some sense of fairness and could be square and honest if he tried hard. And then he was counted in. In every case it went pretty much as it did in the case of the man from Steele's.

"I feel," so the man from Steele's said, "like any other good citizen does. I feel that some of these men are guilty; we don't know which ones, of course. We have formed this opinion by general report from the newspapers. Now, with that feeling it would take some very positive evidence to make me think that these men were not guilty, if I should acquit them.... But I should act entirely upon the testimony."

"But," said the defence, "you say that it would take positive evidence of their innocence before you could consent to return them not guilty?"

"Yes, I should want some strong evidence."

"Well, if that strong evidence of their innocence was not introduced, then you want to convict them?"

"Certainly!"

Then the judge took him in hand, and after a time his Honor got him to say:--

"I believe I could try the case on the evidence alone, fairly."

And so they took him, and they took me in the same way, when it came my turn.

This is scarcely the place to tell the story of that famous trial. It has kept me too long as it is. The trial of the anarchists was an odd accident in my life, however, which, coming, as it did, when I had my foot placed on the ladder of fortune, had something to do with making me what I am to-day. Up to this time I had never reflected much upon the deeper things of life. The world seemed good to me--a stout, hearty place to fight in. I had made money in the scheme of things as they are, and I found it good. I wanted to make some more money, and I had little patience with the kickers who tried to upset the machine. But I had not reasoned it out. There in the court room, and later shut up in the jury quarters, day after day, cut off from my usual habits, I thought over some of the real questions of our life, and made for myself a kind of philosophy.

To-day, after the lapse of eighteen years, I can see it all as I saw it then: the small, dirty court room; the cold, precise face of the judge; the faces of the eight men whom the police had ferreted out of their holes for us to try. There wasn't much dignity in the performance: some pretty, fas.h.i.+onably dressed girls sat up behind the judge, almost touching elbows with his Honor. They came there as though to the play, whispering and eating candy. There was the wrangling among the lawyers, snarling back and forth to show their earnestness. But my eyes came back oftenest to the faces of those eight men, for whose lives the game was being played. Two were stupid; three were s.h.i.+fty; but the other three had an honest glow, a kind of wild enthusiasm, that came with their foreign blood, maybe. They were dreamers of wild dreams, but no thugs!