se of Pinkertons had antagonized
even those who normally favored the open shop. Berkman's attack, so
alien and repugnant to our democratic mores, completely changed the
situation. Frick became the hero of the day. Journalists and public men
vied in praise of the victim and execration of the assailant. The fact
that the latter was of Russian birth and an anarchist only served to
strengthen his guilt. Although Frick recovered from his wounds with
extraordinary rapidity and was back at his desk within a fortnight, and
although the law of Pennsylvania limited punishment for the crime to
seven years, the defendant was tried without benefit of legal counsel
and sentenced to twenty-two years' imprisonment.

The ascetic youth was thoroughly dismayed by the calamitous turn of
events. He regarded Frick as "an enemy of the People," a cruel exploiter
of labor who had to be destroyed as a concrete warning of the oncoming
revolution. He gloried in this opportunity to serve the American workers
in the manner of the Russian nihilists. It pained him therefore to think
that he owed his failure to kill Frick to the interference of the very
workers for whom he was ready to die. The attack upon him by John Most
was distressing enough, but the scornful repudiation by the strikers and
the coolness of labor everywhere cut him to the heart. Suffering the
anguish of a living death in one of the worst prisons in the United
States, he sought comfort in the thought that he was a revolutionist and
not a would-be murderer. "A revolutionist," he later explained, "would
rather perish a thousand times than be guilty of what is ordinarily
called murder. In truth, murder and _Attentat_ are to me opposite terms.
To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and
opportunity to an oppressed people." Some years afterwards he came to
believe that even such shedding of blood "must be resorted to only as a
last extremity." It was this faith in the ideal for which he was
prepared to die that kept him alive through fourteen years of physical
torture and mental martyrdom. One need only read his _Prison Memoirs of
an Anarchist_, a work of extraordinary acumen and power, to appreciate
the high purpose that had motivated him and the strength of character
that enabled him to turn his prison trials into spiritual triumphs.

Emma, his lover and accomplice, from the very first defended him with
passionate abandon. To her he was "the idealist whose humanit