Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/32

 tional, and that he was ready, if anybody would resist it, to ake his case before the Supreme Court to prove that the Government could not ship American citizens to Europe.

Again, I am only asking you to realize the time in which these articles were written. It is customary when a law and a system of law, and a whole system of civilization, is under consideration by this country, for the people who do not believe in it to go about the country denouncing it in unmeasured terms, and it is not customery for them suddenly to stop as though they were timid of their rights and liberties, the moment the law is passed. The only thing that these articles prove is that I was one of the citizens who were violently opposed to that change, and that I chose to talk at least until the day of the passage of the law in question. Why, even if I had gone round the country making this speech everywhere, shouting it all over the land, and with no other specific intent but to oppose the law, that would not prove that after it was passed I would not conform my conduct to its provisions. But I did not go round shouting it over the country without any other specific intent. I made these remarks just once, and the place at which I made them was a meeting called to demand of our Government an endorsement of the Russian peace terms. That was my announced public intent in making the speech, and that is the intent which is contained in the conclusion of the speech itself.

HAVE described to you in my testimony how after the passage of that law my feeling of rebellious opposition to war was sobered by the law, and how it gradually transferred itself from a negative opposition to the war, to a more positive demand that we should endorse these Russian peace terms, which I believed would lead us quickly out of the war