ncinnati, March 17. He was on an agitation
trip, and when he reached Cincinnati he took sick with erysipelas and
died within a few days, surrounded by his comrades.

Shortly before that he had the fortune to taste of the kindness and good
breeding of the police once more. Some friends in Philadelphia arranged
a meeting to celebrate Most's sixtieth birthday. He was one of the
speakers; but the police of that city interpreted the American
Constitution, which speaks of the right to free speech and assembly, as
giving the right to forcibly disperse the meeting.

Conscious misrepresentation and ignorance, the twin angels that hover
over the throne of the newspaper kingdom of this country, have made John
Most a scarecrow. Organized police authorities and police justices that
can neither be accused of a surplus of intelligence nor even of the
shadow of love of fairness, made him their target whenever they felt the
great calling to save their country from disaster. Naturally the mob of
law-abiding citizens must be assured from time to time that their
masters have a sacred duty to perform, that they earn the right of
graft.

Most was born at Augsburg, Bavaria, February 5, 1846. According to his
memoirs, he early found it necessary to resist the tyranny of a
stepmother and the miserable treatment of his master. As a bookbinder
apprentice, at a very early age, he took to his heels and went on the
road of the world, where he soon came in contact with revolutionary
ideas in the labor movement that greatly inspired him and urged him to
read and study. It might be more appropriately said that he developed a
ravenous appetite for knowledge and research of all the works of human
science.

At that time socialistic ideas had just begun to exercise great
influence upon the thinking mind of the European continents. The zeal
and craving for knowledge displayed by the working people of those days
can hardly be properly estimated, especially by the proletariat of this
country, whose literature and source of knowledge chiefly consists of
the daily papers. Workingmen, who worked ten and twelve hours in
factories and shops, spent their evenings in study and reading of
economic, political and philosophic works--Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl
Marx, Engels, Bakunin and, later, Kropotkin; also Henry George's
"Progress and Poverty." Added to these were the works of the
materialistic-natural science schools, such as Darwin, Huxley,
Molleschot, Karl Vogt