“Henceforth bread shall not be made a product of speculation.  The hungry mouths of women and children shall not go unfed that the stock broker and the grain speculator may amass fortunes.

“The Cotton King of Massachusetts, who has kept men and women out of employment, and in their stead has worked children in his mills, was killed in his office as he refused the fifth appeal for an advance of three cents a day in the pay of the six thousand half-grown children, most of them girls, who tended his looms and spindles for pauper wages.

“The man who thus abolished for all time the further slaughter of innocents, went to eternity with the dragon he had slain.  The mill owner went to expiate his sins; the martyr to receive his reward.

“And in New York, the city which I have just left, the ruler of the Nation’s money, the President of the Consolidated Banker’s Exchange, died in a pot of molten lead which he had been brought to hope would be turned into gold under the touch of an alchemist.  The lust of gold that in life had been his only incentive, proved the means of his undoing.

“Bond syndicates will no longer be formed to corner the people’s money, that millions may be squeezed from the public treasury.

“My fellow-countrymen, this is indeed a great day.

“The full story cannot be told you at a single meeting.

“Know that you are once again free men, not in name only, but in reality; that your children will never suffer the degradation through which you have passed.

“The story of your deliverance you will soon know in its entirety.  To-night I can only give you a summary.”

“Tell us all!  Tell us everything!” thunder the astonished masses.  They forget Metz and Purdy in the presence of this greater news.

“I have only just learned the true facts of this remarkable movement.  The representatives of the people who met in Chicago six months ago to formulate plans for the protection of labor, found that little could be accomplished against the combined wealth of the Trusts.

“A permanent committee of forty was elected to carry out the purposes of the convention.  For several weeks the committee occupied itself in routine work.  Its sub-committees reported that they could make no headway.

“Then at one of the meetings a committeeman named Nevins proposed that inasmuch as the committee had to deal with a wily and unscrupulous foe, it constitute itself into a secret body.

“At the first secret meeting he submitted the plan which was carried into effect to-day.

“It required that every one of the forty men should pledge himself to rid the world of one of its chief tyrants.  He proved to the satisfaction of the men that by so doing they would be securing the blessings of liberty and happiness to mankind.

“He counselled them to strip their acts of any semblance of selfishness by sacrificing themselves with their vanquished enemies.