Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/28

 from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of Government may engage it?"

And this was just a little while after a British force bad taken possession of the City of Washington, and when a conscription law had been recommended by the President.

He speaks of the principle of personal liberty under the Constitution—

"The supporters of the measures before us act on the opposite principle. It is their task to raise arbitrary powers, by construction, out of a plain written charter of National Liberty. It is their pleasing duty to free us of the delusion, which we have fondly cherished, that we are the subjects of a mild, free, and limited Government, and to demonstrate, and to demonstrate by a regular chain of premises and conclusions, that Government possesses over us a power more tyrannical, more arbitrary, more dangerous, more allied to blood and murder, more full of every form of mischief, more productive of every sort and degree of misery than has been exercised by any civilized Government, with one single exception, in modern times."

I said that I felt as though when President Wilson asked us to fight for liberty, and at the same time told us he was going to adopt the principle of conscription, he was saying, "Come on boys, get on your chains, we're going to fight for liberty!" I made the most of that paradox, and that paradox is made the most of in this speech by Daniel Webster.

"A free constitution of Government is to be construed upon free principles, and every branch of its provisions is to receive such an interpretation as is full of its general spirit. No means are to be taken by implication which would strike us absurdly if expressed. And what would have been more