Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/45

 my magazine from the mails. And after the President had taken up this matter once with the Postmaster General, and presumably had seen the August issue and disapproved of it, he wrote me that second cordial letter which I have read to you here, telling me that he wished he could agree with me about the things we talked over at the White House—that is, the civil liberties that should prevail in war-time—but that he believes that war involves a special condition, and that things which are innocent in times of peace are harmful to the public welfare in times of war. And this letter was an additional element in bringing me to realize that it was impossible to publish a perfectly free and arrogantly satirical Socialist magazine in times of war.

Finally, after Augustus Hand rendered his decision sustaining the Postmaster General, and I had really got, as I thought, a statement from the authorities as to what I could do, I went down and opened the whole matter before Mr. Burleson himself, and asked him for a new mailing privilege saying that the courts had sustained him in the matter, and that there was no question about his having the right of a censor. I asked him as a man having that right to give me a careful specification a to what regulations he wanted me to follow, and stated that I would follow them if I applied for a new mailing privilege. And he promised to give me an answer to my application within a week. He treated me with great courtesy, and even understood and in a measure accepted my criticism of him for not having so treated me before, and he gave me a piece of paper containing his interpretation of the Espionage Law, and told me what to quote from it in making my application. And then my old friend Mr. Scripps, who has a temper, got mad at him, and sailed into him and got him mad, and the interview went to smash, and