Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/37

 I shall not go into it any further except to remind you that in two places in that paragraph I took pains to make it plain to my readers that, in expressing admiration for their character, I was not endorsing anything that they had done, or discussing the nature of the act of which they had been accused. If you gentlemen are convinced by the evidence that has been produced here that I am such a person that I would write an article like that, and slyly try to make it evident that I was not endorsing their act, and yet also slyly try to convey to those who were on the inside that I was endorsing their act, then the article is an evidence that that was my intent. But if that was my intent, why does it not appear anywhere else in these fifteen pages of socialistic writing about the war?

It comes then to this one little moralistic paragraph in all these fifteen pages—this one which is entitled "A Question." This single obscure, modest suggestion or plea to the newspapers to be a little less contemptuous of these people (reading "who are resisting the conscription law on the ground that they believe it violates the sacred rights and liberties of men"—these people "who are going to jail because they would not do what they do not believe in doing"—characterized as conscientious objectors. I plead with the American newspapers to be a little less contemptuous of them, and I ask a question: I say, "I wonder if the number is few to whom this high resolve was the distinction of our American idealism"—the resolve to recognize independence in the individual, and I say, "Perhaps there are enough of us, if we make ourselves heard in voice and letter, to modify this ritual of contempt in the daily press, and induce the American Government to undertake the imprisonment of heroic young men with a certain sorrowful dignity that will be new in the