Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/24

 support of the war. To that extent the evidence is exactly as it stands. But if I said that I had in mind a desire to obstruct and stop the plans of the United States Government at that time, it is false. I never had that deliberate intention at any time. I was nevertheless still in that extremely rebellious mood which I have described to you, when I wrote this article—this was written, you will remember, immediately after the declaration of war. And I felt that to say as the President had said in his speech to Congress demanding a declaration of war, that we were going to fight for liberty, but that we were going to adopt conscription, was a contradiction of terms, and that it was an insult in the face of the American people. My feeling was based upon the established tradition of the American Republic—a tradition which is summed up, by the way, in another article quoted from the New York World in our July number. I will read this, merely as an example of what everybody knows. "It has been our pride and our boast that unlike the monarchies of the old world our Government has never been compelled to resort either to conscription of its citizens or the employment of foreign mercenaries. It is a treasured and honored tradition of the Anglo-Saxon race that exemption from extorted military service is one of the peculiar privileges of free men." I think it will be admitted that that has been the attitude of our country and of our race—that it was exceedingly surprising that with so little argument in Congress, and with so little public opposition of any kind, our Government could adopt this principle of conscription, substituting the ideal of military efficiency for the ideal of personal liberty.

And still under the influence of that mood of mind—which was almost it seems to me not the mood of a radical but of an old fashioned American—I read this appeal from the Russian