Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/5

 mood and our policy. And that mood and policy brought us a good deal of fame and a good deal of recognition from high and wide sources. And though you may think it was not an appropriate mood for a socialist magazine in war times, and you may be right, still it is the mood in which a good deal of the greatest art, and the greatest literature, and much of the truth of the world, has been uttered. I have no disposition to apologize for it. I only ask you to realize that that is what we had been doing for five years before the war was declared, and that was the way in which we had been doing it. And I ask you, therefore, not to be misled by the extremeness and the passion with which some of us presented our points of view, into thinking that this was something new and something adopted with a special animus upon the entrance of this country into the war. It was what we had been doing all the time. We never had any meeting to discuss our attitude toward this war. We never adopted any policy toward this war. We never adopted any policy toward anything. We simply continued to express, each in his own chosen way, his own opinion and emotion about the policies of our Government.

Again you must remember in judging our underlying intention—and you must remember it all the time in your deliberations if you want to give a just verdict on this case—that these things were published then, and not now. They were published before this country had got into the fight. They were published before one single man of our fellow citizens, so far as was publicly known, had set foot in the trenches of Europe. Now, I think that it can legitimately be said that we continued our mood of satire longer than was in good taste. Other things can be said, of course, but that is one thing that can be said, and I myself have testified that