Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/19

 express to the full force of language its opposition in public to the policies of the government. And it will stand or fall with the courage of the minority so to express itself.

In saying this, I do not ignore the right of a state to pass extraordinary laws in an emergency. I do not ignore the right of the government to defend its armies with a military and war-time censorship. I am not a bigoted or fanatical advocate of the mere abstract principle of free speech. I simply say that if a government avails itself of this right of wartime censorship, in order to suppress and whip into the jails as criminals the candid and sincere spokesmen of a political minority which is opposed to its policies, then that government is violating not only the principles of the United States Constitution, but the spirit and the principles of free government as they have existed in the earth from the beginning. And I predict that the acts and enactments—the laws and the interpretations of law, which this government has created, which are in violation of this right of the minority to express its public opposition—those acts and enactments will die, and they will die soon, and they will die whether this war continues or not. On the other hand, I predict that the St. Louis resolution will live, and will occupy a place in the soberly written history of these times not without tranquil honor. As a member of the party that adopted it, and as an American citizen who still dares to believe in his rights, I have no hesitation in telling you that I endorsed that resolution. And although subsequently, during last winter and spring when Germany was invading Russia, I passed through a period of extreme doubt, and was almost ready to lay the resolution aside as an expression of abstract principle no longer applicable to the current of affairs, that period of doubt has passed. I think that the Socialists were right in