of Pinkerton thugs (the favourite detective and police defenders of the American plutocracy of fifty years ago) who killed eleven strikers, among them a child of ten. The person responsible for tl)at crime was H. C. Frick, the representative and business partner of Carnegie. The brutal attitude of Frick towards the strikers, his public declaration that he would rather sec every striker killed than concede a single demand, and the final murder on July 6th, 1892, of eleven unarmed workingmen, roused America to indignation. Even the conservative press denounced Frick in the sharpest terms> Throughout America the workers gave vent to their feelings in protest meetings. But there was only one man who translated the wrath of the toilers into a heroic act. That I11an was Alexander Berkman. On the 22nd of July, 1892, he entered the office of H. C. Frick and attempted his life. Three bullets lodged in Frick's body, but he survived. Berkman received a prison sentence of 22 years, although his act-according to the laws of the State of Pennsylvania-called only for 7 years. To give our comrade such a cruel sentence, six charges were framed up against him : · because he dared to strike at the very heart of the American industrial plutocracy. (Preface to Berkman's "The Russian Tragedy," 1922). Berkman spent fourteen years in the Allegheny Penitentiary in Pennsylvania ; he has described that frightful experience in his great book, " Prison Memoirs of an Anarchi.st." When he came out, he threw himself once more into the revolutionary struggle, but it was not till he had written his book that he could free himself from the effects of that black period. He edited the Anarchist monthly paper " Mother Earth " ; he lectured, participated in strikes, and became one of the organisers of°the Ferrer school in New York, and one of its first teachers. In 1914 he was a prime organiser of the anti-militarist campaign which covered the whole of America. 1915 found him in San Francisco, where he started the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist paper "Bla91." He continued this for eighteen months, until in July 1916 the bomb was thrown during the Preparedness Parade, which got the militants Mooney and Billings framed. The Labour leaders and the Socialists refused to have anything to do with the accused men, and left them to their fate. Not so the An- -chists. 4 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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