Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/12

 been conspiring with Jules Guesde, who also and for the same reason, that he is a revolutionary and Marxian socialist, was taken into the French Cabinet, because there are so many socialists in France that they could not run the Government with the consent of the people unless they had a revolutionary socialist in the Cabinet. And we have been conspiring with forty per cent. of the members of the Italian Parliament, and with members of the Italian Cabinet, some of whom were readers of our magazine, and many of whom are friends of Arturo Giovannitti, who is one of our editors. And we have conspired with Arthur Henderson, who is the Chairman of the British Labor Party, which comprises practically all of the laboring class in Great Britain, and who is generally considered the man next in power to Lloyd George in England, and the man who stands the best chance of being the Premier in England after Lloyd George is gone. And we have been conspiring with Emile Vandervelde of the BeligumBelgium [sic] Cabinet, who attends the international socialist conferences in London, to which we, the Socialist Party of America, are regularly invited and expected to send delegates, and he at the same time attends the great war councils of the Governments that are prosecuting this war in Europe. These are our co-conspirators in the opinion that the next development in the history of democracy is the passage from a state of merely political democracy to a state in which the working classes will take possession of the power and make democracy industrial as well as political.

And as to Russia—the court has stated to you that the facts about Russia are in public dispute and that we had better not dispute about them here. And so we will not dispute about those facts, as we cannot. But we will be permitted to assert what is our opinion about those facts. It is