International Notes [excerpt]

     Thus our comrades in America write that the wholesale arrests of Emma Goldman and her innocent friends, their unjust retention in jail and vilification by a rabid and lying press, has done more in a few weeks for the cause of liberty and Anarchism in the States than the spoken and written propaganda of the past fourteen years. Upon quitting prison they have resumed work in an atmosphere as full of hope and energy as, until their incarceration, it had been apathetic. While upon this subject, we would note that Czolgosz died in Auburn prison on Oct. 29th, and that even the press that gloated over his execution was sorrowfully compelled to admit he died like a brave man. It is also a fact, worthy in itself to note, that no official in New York State—even in the case of a so-called assassin—has the courage to send the condemned man to his grave. In every case of death by electrocution, though the prison officials prepare the death apparatus, it is the hand of an unknown convict (bribed by the promise of a shortened sentence) which presses the death-dealing button. Why is this? Does it imply a latent conviction that death sentences are unjust and illegal, or that to kill a man “by law” is work fit only for those who rank in the official mind as the scum of the earth?