Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/26

 ment of which there is no doubt. I read these in order to show you that I am not the first member of the family who could get mad at the idea of conscripting American citizens for service in a foreign war. And I want to tell you the time in which this speech was made. It was made in the middle of a war with England, and just after an invading British force had sailed up the Potomac and taken possession of the City of Washington and walked into the capital and driven the Government out of the capital. It was the time of our greatest national peril, if we omit the Civil War, which was an internal peril. The speech itself contains evidence that that was the time when it was written. "No man had foretold," he says, "that our means of defense would be so far exhausted in foreign invasion as to leave the place of our own deliberations insecure, and that we should this day be legislating in view of the crumbling monuments of our national disgrace. No one had anticipated that this city would have fallen before a handful of troops … while the Government was in full flight."

Those were the conditions under which he delivered the speech on conscription, and he predicted that the American people would not "stand for" conscription. He said, "On the issues of this discussion, I believe the fate of this Government may rest. Its duration is incompatible in my opinion, with the existence of the measure in contemplation. A crisis has at last arrived, to which the course of things has long tended, and which may be decisive upon the happiness of present and of future generations. If there be anything important in the concerns of men, the considerations which fill the present hour, are important."

"When the present generation of men shall be swept away, and that this Government ever existed shall be batter of his-