Page:Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (1918).pdf/35

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not kill, and his inability to prove it to them, that he sat down and wrote a letter home to his family and said, "I cannot prove to these people that I am not a coward in any other way except by dying for my belief," and he borrowed a gun from a soldier who had one, and he shot himself through the heart. Now, I admire the moral courage of that man, and I admire his physical courage, too, and I will admire it just as long as I admire Jesus Christ, or Abraham Lincoln, or the soldiers who have enlisted in the army, or anybody else who is ready to die and to suffer for his principles.

I think I have demonstrated by the testimony here, leaving out any assertions of mine, that during the time after this conscription law was passed and while I was demanding an endorsement of these Russian peace terms, although I was not for the war, I was not for our withdrawing from the war either. I never demanded that. I never spoke for it. I was not for the defeat of this country.

Mr. Barnes has demonstrated a thing that surprised me somewhat—that he has in his files the account of the moneys that I received in support of The Masses. And if he has that, he knows whom I received them from. And if there was any suspicion or taint of suspicion at any point in my accounts that I ever took a cent from any source that was sympathetic to the cause of Germany or to any of the central empires, he would have produced that evidence here. But he has not produced it here, and I did not produce it either, for the reason that if it were produced it would be all over the front pages of the New York papers tomorrow. For the people who believed in our sincerity and honesty in The Masses, and who gave us money to keep it going, are people prominent in the commercial and civic life of this city.

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