Page 1

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,