Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/8

 nounced to him that "he would like nothing better than to see the entire military and naval program of the United States go to smash." Now, I don't believe that Merrill Rogers ever said those words to any man in his life. He never said anything like that to me. Nothing like that was ever said around the office of the Masses, and it was never thought, and it was never felt by any of us. We never desired the defeat of this country or its failure in the war at any time. We never—most of us—even desired a separate peace. I cannot give you anything perhaps except my own conviction that Merrill Rogers never uttered any such words, except this—that if he had been such a character and such a fool that he would announce to a salesman—an ordinary salesman with whom he had only a business acquaintance—that he would like to see the whole enterprise of the United States go to smash, then he would have been saying it to everybody all the time, and the District Attorney, with all the detective service of the United States at his command, could very easily have brought plenty of people in here to prove that he actually said it, and said it under circumstances when a sane man could believe that he really did say it. The only thing there is to prove that I or any of the rest of these defendants conspired with him to do anything, is the letter which was written in the late autumn, and which absolutely proves that we never did conspire to do anything. It is a letter which he wrote to some potential subscriber, telling him that we had gotten a new mailing privilege from Burleson, and that we were not going to change the policy of the magazine; and he wrote that letter at the same time that I was telling Mr. Burleson that we were going to change the policy of the magazine in accordance, not with the Espionage Law, but with his extreme interpretation of the Espion-