and reasoning only
because you possess a prolongation of the spinal marrow, assume the
right to judge one of your fellows.

"Ah! gentlemen, how little a thing is your assembly and your verdict
in the history of humanity; and human history, in its turn, is
likewise a very little thing in the whirlwind which bears it through
immensity, and which is destined to disappear, or at least to be
transformed, in order to begin again the same history and the same
facts, a veritably perpetual play of cosmic forces renewing and
transferring themselves forever."

Will anyone say that Vaillant was an ignorant, vicious man, or a
lunatic? Was not his mind singularly clear, analytic? No wonder
that the best intellectual forces of France spoke in his behalf, and
signed the petition to President Carnot, asking him to commute
Vaillant's death sentence.

Carnot would listen to no entreaty; he insisted on more than a pound
of flesh, he wanted Vaillant's life, and then--the inevitable
happened: President Carnot was killed. On the handle of the stiletto
used by the ATTENTATER was engraved, significantly,

VAILLANT!

Santa Caserio was an Anarchist. He could have gotten away, saved
himself; but he remained, he stood the consequences.

His reasons for the act are set forth in so simple, dignified, and
childlike manner that one is reminded of the touching tribute paid
Caserio by his teacher of the little village school, Ada Negri, the
Italian poet, who spoke of him as a sweet, tender plant, of too fine
and sensitive texture to stand the cruel strain of the world.

"Gentlemen of the Jury! I do not propose to make a defense, but only
an explanation of my deed.

"Since my early youth I began to learn that present society is badly
organized, so badly that every day many wretched men commit suicide,
leaving women and children in the most terrible distress. Workers,
by thousands, seek for work and can not find it. Poor families beg
for food and shiver with cold; they suffer the greatest misery; the
little ones ask their miserable mothers for food, and the mothers
can not give them, because they have nothing. The few things
which the home contained have already been sold or pawned. All they
can do is beg alms; often they are arrested as vagabonds.

"I went away from my native place because I was frequently moved to
tears at seeing little girls of eight or ten years obliged to work
fifteen hours a day for