Biography of Herr Most. His past career and early training. His imprisonment in the BastileBastille and Red Tower for preaching his gospel of blood. Extracts from his inflammatory utterances. Whet your daggers. Let every prince find a Brutus by his throne.
THE PAST CAREER OF HERR MOST.
That practice has now become obsolete of predicting the future of a child by consulting the aspect of the planet under which it was born at the day and hour of birth. At the advent of Herr Most upon this mundane sphere, who, looking through the horroscope of his future, but could in the interests of humanity, have wished that the feeble spark of life in the frail tenimenttenement might have become extinguished, or that it had never existed.
In the city of Augsburg on the River Lech, which is a tributary of the blue rolling Danube in Bavaria in Germany, in the year 1846, and on the 5th day of February Herr Most first saw the light of day. A long period of sickness while yet an infant served to render his features hideous by some malignant disease eating away a portion of his cheek, but his record goes to prove conclusively that he still retained enough to render himself obnoxious to every lover of law and order.
Endowed by nature with procivitiesproclivities to resist all rule and law, gained from an unloving stepmother much harsh treatment. He became apprenticed to a book-binder when a mere lad, and the cruel treatment received at the hands of his employer failed to change the bent of his inclinations. He had a passion for the stage which he gratified by striking an attitude and reciting in tragic style with dramatic effect any occurrence which attracted his attention to the infinite amusement of boys, and pedestrians on the street would stop to listen to his native eloquence and behold his crude dramatic gestures. We find him in Switzerland in 1867, endeavoring to establish anarchy with a zeal worthy of a better cause. We next find him in Vienna where in one of his scathing speeches he characterized Liberalism as a swindle; the priests as deceivers. For this speech he received a jail sentence of four weeks. Shortly after his release, he was again sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. However, after having served six months of the term, through some ministerial change, he was released. A half an hour later he was again on the platform firing hot shot and shell into the ranks of the government with all the force of his burning invective. His ability to sway the masses alarmed the new government, and they took measures to have him banished. He went to Chemnitz where he became popular as an agitator, and successful in establishing his doctrine of anarchy as the gospel of blood, for which he was incarcerated temporarily in the red tower, a very unpopular jail. September 3, 1872, while returning from Mayence, where he had attended a socialistic congress, he was again arrested, and a few days later was sentenced to eight months in prison. In 1874, for some expressions used in favor of the commune of Paris, although a member of Parliament, he was given eighteen months in the German bastileBastille. At the expiration of his sentence he became identified with the Berlin Free Press, and for his freedom of speech he was again sentenced to six months in jail, having served his sentence he crossed out of his native land to London where he took charge of the new journal, the Freiheit, and while occupying this position he received a pressing invitation to come to Chicago and take charge of the Arbeiter Zeitung, which he declined, believing as he did that the era of the mad misrule of anarchy was on the eve of being inaugurated. He visited Paris, and during his stay directed a speech full of burning hatred against the German Emperor, for which he was accorded two years in jail. On his release he hastened to put the channel between him and that hated country. In 1880 he was again in Switzerland, scattering the seeds of anarchy, and forging thunderbolts for his enemies, and many of his publications found their way throughout the length and breadth of Europe.
In one of his effusions he said:
“Science has put in our possession instruments with which beasts of society may be removed. Princes, ministers, statesmen, bishops, prelates and other officials, civil and clerical, journalists and lawyers, representatives of the aristocracy and middle classes, must have their heads broken.”
When Alexander II. of Russia was murdered, “Triumph! triumph!” he wrote; “the monster has been executed,” etc., and yet this “monster” (?) was the man who had struck the manacles from the feet of Russia’s serfs; had lifted millions of a degraded people to citizenship. His outburst on this occasion gained him sixteen months in an English prison. In December of 1882 he was en route for New York, where he met with a most enthusiastic reception.
The anarchists have now eleven regular organs in circulation. Five of these appear in English, five in German, and one in the French language. A few extracts we herein embody will serve to demonstrate the savage nature of these agitators. He says:
“If each member of the anarchist party some fine morning would seek out some hated tyrant and pick a quarrel; if only each man would carry a private supply of some destructive agency in his pocket and would either stab, poison, or with powder, lead, or dynamite do to death our enemies, wherever found, in house, office, bureau, shop, or factory; if that could only be done in fifty places at the same moment; if fires could only be started in fifty different places at the same time; if only special parties detailed for the purpose would cut the telephone and telegraph wires—must not a general panic result? Would not society be wild with fright? And would not the rabble as if by magic be inflamed with revolutionary passion?”
Can anything be more diabolical? But Most’s paper, from which I have quoted, is mild compared with the Rebell. This sheet is the organ of Peukert. At present both papers vie with each other in disseminating anarchism among the farming population. In 1884 Most said: “To find a way for getting $100,000,000 would do the cause more good than to dash the brains out of ten kings. Gold—money—is wanted.
“Lay hold where and when you can,” he continues. “The less noise you make in laying and carrying out your plans the less danger and the better success. The revolver is good in extreme cases, dynamite in great movements, but, generally speaking, the dagger and poison are the best means of propagation. Yes, tremble, ye canaille, ye bloodsuckers, ye ravishers of maidens, murderers, and hangmen, the day of reckoning and revenge is near. The fight has begun along the picket line. A girdle of dynamite encircles the world, not only the old but the new. The bloody band of tyrants are dancing on the surface of a volcano. There is dynamite in England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, New York, and Canada. It will be hot on the day of action, and yet the brood will shudder in the sight of death and gnash their teeth. Set fire to the houses, put poison in all kinds of food, put poisoned nails on the chairs occupied by our enemies, dig mines and fill them with explosives, whet your daggers, load your revolvers, cap them, fill bombs and have them ready. Hurl the priest from the altar; shoot him down! Let each prince find a Brutus by his throne.”
The foregoing language is calculated to tend toward subversion of law and justice, and is revolutionary and treasonable in its nature, teachings of this nature from Reinsdorf and Most, are the direct cause of our Haymarket massacre. The authorities are responsible largely for the commission of crime which they may prevent even by resorting to extreme measures in enforcing the law. While we desire peace in all our borders, yet we believe that transgressors of the law should be made to feel that “God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives.”
