Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/18

 working classes, just as they would be personally interested in making the world more democratic, would also be personally interested in preventing war. It is a fact well known to history that most wars—not all of them, but most wars—have been wars over thinly disguised conflicts of business or commercial interests. Most wars have been wars about wealth. And the Socialists have believed that the working people, since they really do not have any wealth to go to war about, would be the ones to prevent war. And so they formed an international union of working men, and this international union, familiarly known all over the world as "The International," stood as a pledge between large bodies of Socialistic working-men in all the countries—a pledge that they had no quarrel with each other, and that they could have none, and that if their governments went to war, they would oppose the war with all their strength. And when this war in Europe came, in each of the countries some of the Socialists were true to their pledge, and some of them, for better reasons or worse, were not. But in this country—in America—so remote as it was from the passions of contact in battle, so remote from the danger of invasion, so free to take the course of peace-maker if it chose, it seemed to the Socialist Party that there was very little reason, and no reason at all, why as men and women of integrity and courage they should not keep their pledge. And so they kept their pledge. They adopted that St. Louis resolution, absolutely condemning the entrance of the United States into this war.

And I want to say that in so doing, they were only exercising their assured rights as American citizens under the Constitution. If there is liberty in this country, even in a" civil sense, if there is democracy, even in a political sense, it will stand or fall with the right of the minority to