Max Eastman

“ I made the most of that paradox, and that paradox is made the most of in this speech by Daniel Webster.
"A free constitution of Government is to be construed upon free principles, and every branch of its provisions is to receive such an interpretation as is full of its general spirit. No means are to be taken by implication which would strike us absurdly if expressed. And what would have been more absurd than for this Constitution to have said that to secure the great blessings of liberty it gave to Government an uncontrolled power of military conscription?" ”

“ It is their pleasing duty to free us of the delusion, which we have fondly cherished, that we are the subjects of a mild, free, and limited Government, and to demonstrate, and to demonstrate by a regular chain of premises and conclusions, that Government possesses over us a power more tyrannical, more arbitrary, more dangerous, more allied to blood and murder, more full of every form of mischief, more productive of every sort and degree of misery than has been exercised by any civilized Government, with one single exception, in modern times. ”

“ I want you to exercise a very judicial poise and restraint in a few minutes, when the District Attorney gets up and begins to attack us, and tries to paint us as a red and bloody bunch of "Bolsheviki," who are trying to introduce anarchy and overthrow civilization, and who have not any respect for the institutions of popular government, and when he says that we have been calling American soldiers and sailors "blackguards," which is absolutely false, and all the other things it is necessary for him to say. ”

“ I am older than Jack Reed, and I think I was sobered a good deal more quickly than some of the editors of the Masses to a realization of the fact that the United States had really got into a world war, and could not get out except by carrying it forward in a diplomatic and military way to some sort of conclusion. But at the time when most of these articles were published, none of us, and not half of the American people, had taken into their breasts the full sense and tragic significance of the fact that we are in this war, and that thousands of our friends are going to die. ”

“ Nor is it, sir, for the defense of his own house or home, that he who is the subject of military draft is to perform the task allotted to him. You will put him upon a service equally foreign to his interests and abhorrent to his feelings. With his aid you are to push your purposes of conquests. The battles which he is to fight are the battles of invasion—battles which he detests perhaps and abhors, less from the danger and the death that gather over them, and the blood with which they drench the plain, than from the principles in which they have their origin. ”

“ It is a faith which possesses more adherents all over the surface of the earth who acknowledge its name and subscribe to its principles, than any other faith ever had, except those private and mysterious ones that we call religious. It is either the most beautiful and courageous mistake that hundreds of millions of mankind ever made, or else it is really the truth that will lead us out of our misery, and anxiety, and poverty, and war, and strife and hatred between classes, into a free and happy world. ”

“ That is all there is to Socialism, except this—we know just as well as you know that it would not be practical to expect the rich people, the capitalists, those who benefit by the present system of politics and industry, to be the ones who are going to want to change it. We know perfectly well that the people who are going to want to change it are the poorer people—the working people—the small farmers—the small business men, who are not very sure of their jobs, and who are immediately under the domination of somebody, and do not feel very free. ”

“ And I predict that the acts and enactments—the laws and the interpretations of law, which this government has created, which are in violation of this right of the minority to express its public opposition—those acts and enactments will die, and they will die soon, and they will die whether this war continues or not. ”

“ Who shall describe to you the distress and anguish which they will spread over those hills and valleys, where men have heretofore been accustomed to labor, and to rest in security and happiness. Anticipate the scene, sir, when the class shall assemble to stand its draft, and to throw the dice of blood. What a group of wives and mothers and sisters, of helpless age and helpless infancy, shall gather round the theatre of this horrible lottery, as if the stroke of death were to fall from heaven before their eyes on a father, a brother, a son or a husband. ”

“ And they have had a belief that the working classes, just as they would be personally interested in making the world more democratic, would also be personally interested in preventing war. It is a fact well known to history that most wars—not all of them, but most wars—have been wars over thinly disguised conflicts of business or commercial interests. Most wars have been wars about wealth. And the Socialists have believed that the working people, since they really do not have any wealth to go to war about, would be the ones to prevent war. ”

“ Therefore, I want to say this—that if there is pro-German intrigue on the part of the people who are in power in Russia, then we are not in sympathy with those people. If there is an indiscriminate reign of terror in Russia, then we are not in sympathy with the conditions which prevail in Russia. If there is a movement to overthrow and ruin civilization and establish a condition of anarchy in Russia, then we are not in sympathy with Russia. ”

“ But in this country—in America—so remote as it was from the passions of contact in battle, so remote from the danger of invasion, so free to take the course of peace-maker if it chose, it seemed to the Socialist Party that there was very little reason, and no reason at all, why as men and women of integrity and courage they should not keep their pledge. ”

“ And so they formed an international union of working men, and this international union, familiarly known all over the world as "The International," stood as a pledge between large bodies of Socialistic working-men in all the countries—a pledge that they had no quarrel with each other, and that they could have none, and that if their governments went to war, they would oppose the war with all their strength. And when this war in Europe came, in each of the countries some of the Socialists were true to their pledge, and some of them, for better reasons or worse, were not. ”

“ And they believe in liberty and democracy exactly in the same way that Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, and all the rest of the true revolutionary fathers whose hearts are in the Declaration of Independence, believed in liberty and democracy. Only it is their opinion that real democracy does not consist merely in letting the people elect the officials who shall govern them, and they believe that true liberty is not guaranteed to a citizen merely by the possession of the right to vote. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is going to try to prove to you that we conspired to overthrow the enterprise of the United States Government because we believe in that philosophy, of historic development which asserts that the next step in the progress of democracy beyond what we have now, is the coming into political power of the working class, and the taking over by the working class—by the mass of the people as a single whole—of the instruments of production. ”

“ And then he drew a picture of big business saying, "Run along," to Congress, "we got through with you when you declared war." And he added the words "For us," because he has echoes in his mind of a socialist philosophy which asserts that absolutely everything is caused and regulated and dominated by business, and it was just as natural for him to add "for us" to that, as though he were a Presbyterian theologian and that were part of his theology. It is the regular socialist doctrine. None of us believed that big business had been the exclusive cause of this war. ”

“ One of the jurors, when he was questioned as to whether he had a prejudice against Socialism, said that he had no prejudice, except against that part of it which opposes religion. Well, there is no part of Socialism which opposes religion, and there never has been, and the assertion that there is, or that there ever has been, is merely one of the malicious lies which those who are trying to promote a propaganda against it have indulged in. ”

“ It is a treasured and honored tradition of the Anglo-Saxon race that exemption from extorted military service is one of the peculiar privileges of free men." I think it will be admitted that that has been the attitude of our country and of our race—that it was exceedingly surprising that with so little argument in Congress, and with so little public opposition of any kind, our Government could adopt this principle of conscription, substituting the ideal of military efficiency for the ideal of personal liberty. ”

“ It seems to me that when you write an article and definitely state that your intention is to induce the Government to put people in jail in a certain way, you ought to be assumed, if there is nothing to prove the contrary, to have had that intent in your mind when you wrote the article—especially when it is one little idealistic and almost religious sentiment expressed in the midst of fifteen entire pages, in which there is nothing else on the subject. ”

“ I was nevertheless still in that extremely rebellious mood which I have described to you, when I wrote this article—this was written, you will remember, immediately after the declaration of war. And I felt that to say as the President had said in his speech to Congress demanding a declaration of war, that we were going to fight for liberty, but that we were going to adopt conscription, was a contradiction of terms, and that it was an insult in the face of the American people. ”

“ If the Government cannot hire men voluntarily to fight its battles, neither can individuals. If the war should continue, there will be no escape, and every man's fate and every man's life will come to depend on the issue of the military draft. ”

“ Does the lot fall on the father of a family? His children already orphans, shail see his face no more. When they behold him for the last time, they shall see him lashed and fettered, and dragged away from his own threshold, like a felon and an outlaw. ”

“ It is customary when a law and a system of law, and a whole system of civilization, is under consideration by this country, for the people who do not believe in it to go about the country denouncing it in unmeasured terms, and it is not customery for them suddenly to stop as though they were timid of their rights and liberties, the moment the law is passed. ”

“ A popular government has taken over, and is successfully running the railroads, and all we have to do is to dispose of the stock and bond indebtedness of the railroads, and we will have Socialism, so far as the railroads are concerned. And the railroads are a big industry, and a complicated industry, and one fit to become a test as to whether or not it is practical for a people to run any industry. This is being done exactly because it is the practical thing to do. It is the simple, quick, sensible thing to do in an emergency. But Socialists believe that the fact that 10 per cent. ”

“ Under present prospects of the continuance of the war, not one-half of them on whom your conscription shall fall will ever return to tell the tale of their sufferings. They will perish of disease and pestilence, or they will leave their bones to whiten in fields beyond the frontier. ”

“ When the present generation of men shall be swept away, and that this Government ever existed shall be batter of history only, I desire that it may be known that you have not proceeded in your course unadmonished and unforewarned. ”

“ And that is natural, because war not only emphasizes the evils of the present situation, but what the governments accomplish during war is so gigantic that it proves to practical minds that it is possible to accomplish gigantic things, even so gigantic a thing as the change from a capitalistic to a Socialistic civilization. ”

“ You must make the distinction between an effort to put out into the general flow of public opinion our attitude toward the policies of the Government, and an attempt to obstruct the military operations of the Government. The principle of free speech is always involved in such cases as this, and its true scope and generosity is really for the jury to determine. ”

“ The charge of conspiracy to overthrow this Government and to obstruct its military enterprises and to break down the foundations of democratic civilization is not proven. The only thing that is proven against us is that we agree in believing in the .philosophy of socialism. We are socialists. Mr. Barnes has given you an account of what he thinks socialism is, and I am going to tell you in some detail what socialism is.
THE Socialists believe in liberty and democracy. They believe in all the liberty and democracy that is possible in an organized, busy community like ours. ”