The revolutionists who were active in the Russian movement of the
80's were but little familiar with the social ideas then agitating
Western Europe and America. Their sole activity consisted in
educating the people, their final goal the destruction of the
autocracy. Socialism and Anarchism were terms hardly known even by
name. Emma Goldman, too, was entirely unfamiliar with the
significance of those ideals.

She arrived in America, as four years previously in Russia, at a
period of great social and political unrest. The working people were
in revolt against the terrible labor conditions; the eight-hour
movement of the Knights of Labor was at its height, and throughout
the country echoed the din of sanguine strife between strikers and
police. The struggle culminated in the great strike against the
Harvester Company of Chicago, the massacre of the strikers, and the
judicial murder of the labor leaders, which followed upon the
historic Haymarket bomb explosion. The Anarchists stood the martyr
test of blood baptism. The apologists of capitalism vainly seek to
justify the killing of Parsons, Spies, Lingg, Fischer, and Engel.
Since the publication of Governor Altgeld's reason for his liberation
of the three incarcerated Haymarket Anarchists, no doubt is left that
a fivefold legal murder had been committed in Chicago, in 1887.

Very few have grasped the significance of the Chicago martyrdom;
least of all the ruling classes. By the destruction of a number of
labor leaders they thought to stem the tide of a world-inspiring
idea. They failed to consider that from the blood of the martyrs
grows the new seed, and that the frightful injustice will win new
converts to the Cause.