Free Onyx City (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles Book 3) by P. J. Thorndyke Page A

those upon whose backs they stand. He’s welcome to come along as well.”
    The club was on Berner Street in Whitechapel, and went by ‘The Working Men’s Educational Society’. It was a small building, but that did not deter people from massing around its doorway that Friday afternoon in a great squeeze to find seats. Most were Jews, and the gathering of such a large number of the heathen sparked off an anti-alien outburst from somebody across the street. “Bloody Lipskis!”
    Lazarus frowned and turned to Kovalev. “I’ve been out of London for the past few years,” he said. “I’m unfamiliar with current slang.”
    “Just a tarred brush they paint us all with,” Kovalev answered. “Israel Lipski lived over on Batty Street, just a block from here. He murdered a girl six months pregnant by pouring nitric acid down her throat. He was hanged last year. His trial was a circus and only increased the hatred of the English for London’s Jews.”
    By the time they got into the club, there were no places left on the long benches that faced the stage. Some kind soul offered up his seat to Kovalev. Lazarus and Mr. Clumps hovered behind him until somebody complained that Mr. Clumps’s massive frame was blocking their view of the stage. The mechanical lumbered off and stood by the wall.
    Lazarus examined the press of people. They were well-dressed for the most part, working class certainly, but clean and respectable as if they were all wearing their Sunday best. There were nearly equal parts men and women. Some were selling copies of the Arbeter Fraynd ; the club’s Yiddish paper which meant ‘Worker’s Friend’. Most knew Kovalev and spoke to him in Russian, German, Yiddish and English. In fact, the number of languages being spoken in the room was astonishing.
    “Are all these people members?” Lazarus asked Kovalev.
    “No,” the old man replied. “Most are just curious public like yourselves who come along to hear the speakers. I’ll introduce you to my comrades afterwards.”
    The main speaker was a man named Yoshka Briedis who spoke on the subject of white slavery in the city of London. He began by outlining the hardships faced by the laboring class, in particular by the immigrant who must flee pogroms and persecutions in his homeland, only to find himself a slave to the ‘thieving class’ here in the wealthiest city in the world. He brought to light the awful reality of the sweatshops where tailors stitched clothing for fourteen hours a day; dulling their eyesight, clogging up their lungs with stuffy air and cloth fibers, denied even the shortest of breaks so that their targets were met. Wives must bring them tea and bread and drop it down their throats while they continued to work. He spoke of the match girl's strike of July, of their exposure to the terrible white phosphorus that rotted their jaws. The speaker even touched on the poor women who were so desperate that they must sell their bodies on the street and face murder at the hands of the demented individual who stalked Whitechapel by night.
    “Are we living in a city with people or in a forest with wild animals?” Mr. Briedis exclaimed. “That in the very heart of so-called civilization one either starves for want of bread or is murdered in the pursuit of it! We all know the concept of private property can only lead to economic enslavement!” There was a cheer from the crowd at this, which seemed to spur Briedis on to hammer home the anarchist message. “Property is a falsehood! Everything belongs to everyone! And no society ever changed without bloodshed, for no government is willing to give up its power without a fight. The class war is not only necessary, but inevitable!”
    The speaker appeared to have finished and the room broke into rapturous applause. Lazarus could see the harsh logic borne of desperation by these people even if the final result unnerved him. If there was any group of revolutionists in London that would have