Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/30

 and to throw the dice of blood. What a group of wives and mothers and sisters, of helpless age and helpless infancy, shall gather round the theatre of this horrible lottery, as if the stroke of death were to fall from heaven before their eyes on a father, a brother, a son or a husband. And in a majority of cases it will be the stroke of death. Under present prospects of the continuance of the war, not one-half of them on whom your conscription shall fall will ever return to tell the tale of their sufferings. They will perish of disease and pestilence, or they will leave their bones to whiten in fields beyond the frontier. Does the lot fall on the father of a family? His children already orphans, shail see his face no more. When they behold him for the last time, they shall see him lashed and fettered, and dragged away from his own threshold, like a felon and an outlaw."

"Nor is it, sir, for the defense of his own house or home, that he who is the subject of military draft is to perform the task allotted to him. You will put him upon a service equally foreign to his interests and abhorrent to his feelings. With his aid you are to push your purposes of conquests. The battles which he is to fight are the battles of invasion—battles which he detests perhaps and abhors, less from the danger and the death that gather over them, and the blood with which they drench the plain, than from the principles in which they have their origin. …"

And if this does not encourage resistance to conscription in advance, I don't know what could. "If, sir, in this strife, he fall—if, while ready to obey every rightful command of Government, he is forced from his home against right, not to contend for the defence of his country, but to prosecute a miserable and detestable project of invasion, and in that strife he fall, 'tis murder. It may stalk above the cognizance of