Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/7

 ter that shows that any of us ever met together for any purpose whatever in all the time that was described in this indictment. He has never produced one letter that I wrote to Art Young and said: "Art, come on over Sunday—I want to talk to you." Not one letter that I wrote to Reed, or that I wrote to Merrill Rogers, or that I wrote to Floyd Dell. He has never produced one single secret-service agent in this court who could say anything to the effect that he ever saw any of us together, or that we ever got together, or that we ever said one word to each other either about this subject or about any other. Generally when you set out to prove that there was a conspiracy to accomplish something, you go into court with evidence to the effect that the people who are charged with the conspiracy got together and tried to accomplish something. He has produced a few letters which were written by Merrill Rogers, and which prove, if they prove anything at all, that Merrill Rogers was trying to sell this magazine and trying to be affable to all our contributors, and was acting in complete innocence of the fact that what he was doing could possibly have any relation whatever to any law. That is all that his letters prove, and that they prove conclusively.

There is nothing against Merrill Rogers after the passage of the Espionage Law under which we are indicted, except the testimony of a salesman, who came down here at the time of our first trial, reading about it in the newspapers, and went to the District Attorney and said:

"I have got something on this man, and I am an American patriot, and I would like to testify against him." And what was his testimony? That he went in and tried to sell a machine to this man, and he talked to him a long time about the machine, and then quite suddenly Merrill an-