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JOHANN MOST IN AMERICA 69
About two thousand working people attended the meeting.
The mayor of the city went in person to hear the
addresses, and later testified that he had reported to Captain
Bonfield, at the nearest police station, that "nothing
had occurred nor was likely to occur to require interference."
Nevertheless, after Mayor Harrison had gone,
Captain Bonfield sent one hundred and seventy-six policemen
to march upon the little crowd that remained.
Captain Ward, the officer in charge, commanded the
meeting to disperse, and, as Fielden, one of the speakers,
retorted that the meeting was a peaceable one, a dynamite
bomb was thrown from an adjoining alley that
killed several policemen and wounded many more.
In the agitation that led up to the Haymarket tragedy,
dynamite had always been glorified as the poor man's
weapon. It was the power that science had given to the
weak to protect them from injustice and tyranny. As
powder and the musket had destroyed feudalism, so
dynamite would destroy capitalism. In the issue of the
Freiheit, March 18, 1883, Most printed an article called
"Revolutionary Principles." Many of the phrases are
Bakounin and
evidently taken from the "Catechism" of
Nechayeff, and the sentiments are identical. During all
this period great meetings were organized to glorify some
martyr who, by the Propaganda of the Deed, had committed
some great crime. For instance, vast meetings
were organized in honor of Stellmacher and others who
had murdered officers of the Viennese police. At one of
Most declared that such acts should not
these meetings
be called murder, because "murder is the killing of a
human being, and I have never heard that a policeman
executed for an attempt on the life
was a human being." (7) When August Reinsdorf was
of the German Emperor,
Most's Freiheit appeared with a heavy black bor-