" left the factory. A pitched battle ensued. The police were
called, and, when they were assaulted with stones, they opened fire on
the crowd, shooting indiscriminately men, women, and children, killing
six and wounding many more. Spies, full of rage, hurried to the office
of _Arbeiter Zeitung_, the anarchist paper, and composed the
proclamation to the workingmen of Chicago which has since become famous
as "the revenge circular." It called upon the workingmen to arm
themselves and to avenge the brutal murder of their brothers. Five
thousand copies of the circular, printed in English and German, were
distributed in the streets. The next evening, May 4, 1886, a mass
meeting was called at the Haymarket. 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 evidently taken from the "Catechism" of Bakounin and
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 these meetings Most
declared that such acts should not be called murder, because "murder is
the killing of a human being, and I have never heard that a policeman
was a human being."[7] When August Reinsdorf was executed for an attempt
on the l