ercer ring in his voice.

"You have parted the wife from her husband, the maid from her lover,
the child from its parents. You have made desolate countless homes
that once were happy, and broken hearts that had no thought of evil
towards you--and you have done all this, and more, to maintain as
vile a despotism as ever insulted the justice of man, or mocked at
the mercy of God.

"In the inscrutable workings of Eternal Justice it has come to pass
that your sentence shall be uttered by the lips of one of your
victims. For no offence known to the laws of earth or Heaven my flesh
has been galled by your chains and torn by your whips. I have toiled
to win your ill-gotten wealth in your mines, and by the hands of your
brutal servants the iron has entered into my soul. Yet I am but one
of thousands whose undeserved agony cries out against you in this
hour of judgment.

"Can you give us back what you have taken from us--the years of life
and health and happiness, our wives and our children, our lovers and
our kindred? You have ravished, but you cannot restore. You have
smitten, but you cannot heal. You have killed, but you cannot make
alive again. If you had ten thousand lives they could not atone,
though each were dragged out to the bitter end in the misery that you
have meted out to others.

"But so far as you and yours can pay the debt it shall be paid to the
uttermost farthing. Every pang that you have inflicted you shall
endure. You shall drag your chains over Siberian snows, and when you
faint by the wayside the lash shall revive you, as in the hands of
your brutal Cossacks it has goaded on your fainting victims. You
shall sweat in the mine and shiver in the cell, and your wives and
your children shall look upon your misery and be helpless to help
you, even as have been the fond ones who have followed your victims
to exile and death.

"They have seen your crimes without protest, and shared in your
wantonness. They have toyed with the gold and jewels which they knew
were bought with the price of misery and death, and so it is just
that they should see your sufferings and share in your doom.

"To the mines for life! And when the last summons comes to you and
me, may Eternal Justice judge between us, and in its equal scales
weigh your crimes against your punishment! Begone! for you have
looked your last on freedom. You are no longer men; you are outcasts
from the pale of the brotherhood of the humanity you have outra