Her voice and that of the Socialists,
their lawyers and their press, sounded in vain. A solid battery of
capitalist papers, legal lights, private detectives and other
means--particularly including the majority of the priests and
clergy--swamped the man and damned him and doomed him from the first
word of the trial.
Money flowed in floods. Perjury overran the banks of the River of
Corruption. Herzog branded the man a thief and fire-eater. Dope-fiends
and harlots from the Red-Light district, "madames" and pimps and
hangers-on, swore to the white-slave activities of this man, who never
yet in all his four and twenty years had so much as entered a brothel.
Forged papers fixed past crimes and sentences on him. By innuendo and
direct statement, dynamitings, arsons, violence and rioting in many
strikes were laid at his door. His Socialist activities were dragged in
the slime of every gutter; and his Party made to suffer for evil deeds
existing only in the foul imagination of the prosecuting attorneys. The
finest "kept" brains in the legal profession conducted the case from
start to finish; and not a juryman was drawn on the panel who was not,
from the first, sworn to convict, and bought and paid for in hard cash.
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