Labor's Martyrs

se not, even though the right of free speech and assembly had been trampled underfoot at the Haymarket Square, the right to a fair trial made into a cruel farce.

On November 11, 1887, Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer and George Engel were led out to the gallows. At the last moment, yielding to the terrific pressure of protest which had been developed by the defense in the last months, and a great wave of general sympathy with the men throughout the country, Governor Oglesby commuted the sentences of Fielden and Schwab to life imprisonment. Two days before the execution--when the defense committee had mobilized a great movement in Chicago--tables for signing petitions to the governor had been set up in the city streets, the able police of Chicago, worthy ancestors of those police who murdered eleven steel strikers at the Republic plant on Memorial Day, 1937, suddenly discovered a bunch of "bombs" in the jail where the men were held. On the next day they announced that Louis Lingg had committ