The State of Utah vs. Joe Hill

FUNERAL ORATION BY JUDGE O.N. HILTON IN MEMORIAM OF JOE HILL AT THE WEST SIDE AUDITORIUM, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25TH, 1915.

Mr. Chairman, men and women of Chicago:

It gives me unqualified pleasure to be with you here today and to join my tribute to yours for this dead man, and I think as I look into your faces that I read a determination, and a grim one too, to know about this matter and what the facts and circumstances are attendant thereon, and while, as the Chairman has stated to you, I was not familiar as an actor with the trial of the case resulting in his conviction, I only entered the case afterwards, still I have been thoroughly conversant with it since that time, and I want to tell it, all of it to you today.

I am going to do that without rancor, without prejudice, without malice. The cold facts as I understand them to be, and I want anyone of you here if you feel so disposed, to ask any questions. I shall be glad to answer; it will not interfere with me at all, I assure you.

Standing here in the precincts of the City of Chicago that has been broadened by the learning of David Swing, and holds in loving memory the tendereness and broad humanity of Robert Ingersol, I feel that it becomes us here to reverently and earnestly speak upon the serious matter before us today, and without prejudice to see if we can gather from the facts of their tragic occurrence something, somehow that will aid the onward march of humanity.

Men are born into the world and die out of it generation upon generation. A distinguised orator once said, "Man the noblest work of creation, is the sport of every wind that blows, of every tied that flows. In the morning he rises up and flourishes; in the evening he is cut down,