Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/1009

FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME 973 was considered so dangerous to the morale of the training camps that she was sentenced to ten years in prison, and yet it was re- peated by every important newspaper in the country during the trial. There is an unconscious irony in all suppression. It lurks be- hind Judge Hough's comparison of the Masses to the Beatitudes/^^ and in the words of Lord Justice Scrutton during this struggle against autocracy: "It had been said that a war could not be con- ducted on the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. It might also be^said that a war could not be conducted on the principles of Magna Charta." "^ Those who gave their Hves for freedom would be the last to thank us for throwing aside so lightly the great traditions of our race. Not satisfied to have justice and almost all the people with our cause, we insisted on ah artificial unanimity of opinion behind the war. Keen intellectual grasp of the President's aims by the nation at large was very difficult when the opponents of his ideaUsm ranged unchecked while the men who urged greater idealism went to prison. In our effortsto silence those who advocated peace without victory we prevented at the very start that vigorous threshing out of fun- damentals which might to-day have saved us from a victory with- out peace. Zechariah Chafee, Jr. Cambridge, Mass. 1** Masses Pub. Co. v. Patten, 245 Fed. 102, 106 (C. C. A. 2d, 191 7). »« Ronnfeldt v. Phillips, 35 T. L. R. 46 (1918, C. A.).