Ralph Chaplin was guilty of the most serious social offense that a man
can commit. While living in an old and shattered social order, he had
championed a new order of society and had expounded a new culture.
Socrates and Jesus, for like offenses, lost their lives. Thousands of
their followers, guilty of no greater crime than that of denouncing
vested wrong and expounding new truths, have suffered in the dungeon,
on the scaffold and at the stake.
Not because he and his fellows conspired to obstruct the war, but
because they denounced the present order of economic society and
taught the inauguration of a better one, are they still held in prison
more than three years after the signing of the armistice; after the
proclamation of peace and the resumption of trade with all of the
enemy countries; after the repeal or the lapse of the Espionage Act
and the other war-time laws under which they were convicted; and after
German agents and German spies, caught red-handed in their attempts to
interfere with the prosecution of the war, have won their freedom
through presidential pardon.
The most dangerous men in the United States, during the years 1917 and
1918, were not those who were taking pay to do the will of the German
or the Austrian Governments, but those who were trying to convince the
American working people that they should throw aside a system of
economic parasitism and economic exploitation, should take possession
of the machinery of production and should secure for themselves the
product of their own toil. In the eyes of the masters of American
life, such men are still dangerous, and that is the reason that they
are kept in prison.