Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/20

 judging this war to be a war to which their general principle of opposition to all international war properly applies. I had no hand in writing the St. Louis resolution, and it contained modes of expression that would not be mine, but as for the principles that it proclaimed with courage in a time of stress, they are my principles.

I believe that they are the principles of my co-defendants here. And they are the principles of hundreds of thousands of good American citizens—not so many American citizens as of the citizens of Europe—and we confess that we are a good deal more lonely in this court than we would be in a court in France, where millions of people would understand us, and where the jury would not need to be told that our faith is noble and scientific and sincere, and not traitorous, whatever else it may be. Still there are hundreds of thousands of American citizens who hold this faith, and the number is growing greater with the illumination that comes in a period of great stress and endeavor. There were, before this war came, approximately thirty million Socialists all over the globe. Today there are hundreds of millions. And that is natural, because war not only emphasizes the evils of the present situation, but what the governments accomplish during war is so gigantic that it proves to practical minds that it is possible to accomplish gigantic things, even so gigantic a thing as the change from a capitalistic to a Socialistic civilization.

And so I ask you that, whatever your own judgment of the truth or wisdom of our faith may be, you will respect it as one of the heroic ideas and ardent beliefs of humanity's history. It is a faith which possesses more adherents all over the surface of the earth who acknowledge its name and subscribe to its principles, than any other faith ever had, except those private and mysterious ones that we call religious.