The revolt of labour has extended to the New World.
The different societies of workmen in the United States had arranged for a series of strikes to secure a legal day of eight hours, and on May 1st the strikes began. They were not general, but some fifty thousand workmen left off work in different cities, and all the smaller trades, especially brewing and furniture-making, were disorganised. The foreign Socialists in Chicago took advantage of this state of affairs, and of a scuffle with the police, and their leaders, in language of unexampled violence, called their followers to arms, summoning an armed meeting in the Haymarket at 10 p.m. of the 4th inst. Fifteen thousand men, chiefly South Germans, Poles, Bohemians, and other foreigners, attended, and when the police ordered them to disperse, resisted. A -dynamite bomb was thrown by a Socialist, which shattered twenty-nine policemen, and their comrades fired. The crowd, most of whom had been soldiers, returned the fire from revolvers, and in a brief contest some eighty men on both sides were shot down. The mob at last fled, and the police regaining possession of the town, arrested the leaders—who are editors of Anarchist newspapers, named Spies and Fielding—and intend to prosecute them for murder. The real Americans are growing excited, and the tone of the whole Union is to put the Socialists down with shot and steel, hanging their leaders, if possible with all forms of law, but in any case hanging them. On the 5th inst., the same mob marched on Milwaukee to order a factory to be closed. They were met by the citizen soldiery of the State, and ordered to disperse, and as they did not do so, were, without any Riot Act, dispersed by a volley.
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