affair. In its concluding statements, the defense argued that Prager's lynching was justified by "unwritten law", which does not allow unpatriotic talk. After five days of statements and testimony, the case went to the jury on June 1, 1918. After deliberating 10 minutes, the jury found all the defendants to be innocent. One juryman reportedly shouted, "Well, I guess nobody can say we aren't loyal now". The prosecuting attorney dropped charges against the four policemen and George Davis, the defendant who had never been found. A week after the trial, editor and publisher J.O. Monroe wrote an editorial in the Collinsville Herald, saying, "Outside of a few persons who may still harbor Germanic inclinations, the whole city is glad that the eleven men indicted for the hanging of Robert P. Prager were acquitted." And further, "the community is well convinced that he was disloyal.... The city does not miss him. The lesson of his death has had a wholesome effect on the Germanists of Collinsville and the rest of the nation." A New York Times editorial said, "The new unwritten law appears to be that any group of men may execute justice, or what they consider justice, in any case growing out of the war." The Chicago Daily Tribune editorialized: “The lynching of Prager was reprehensible enough in itself, but the effort to excuse it as an act of ‘popular justice’ is worse.” The St. Louis Star noted that men were acquitted of lynching while American troops fought for democracy abroad: “We must save our own soul as a nation. We cannot let ourselves go in such a way as was done in the Prager outrage and hold up our heads as civilized people. We are battling for right and humanity and should exhibit those qualities ourselves or be open to the charge of hypocrisy. We cannot successfully battle the Hun if we are to become the Hun ourselves.” See also Anti-German sentiment Lynching of Olli Kinkkonen Footnotes Further reading Donald R. Hickey, "The Prager Affair: A Study in Wartime Hysteria," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 62, no. 2 (Summer 1969), pp. 117–134. In JSTOR E.A. Schwartz, "The Lynching of Robert Prager, the United Mine Workers, and the Problems of Patriotism in 1918," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 95, no. 4 (Winter 2003), pp. 414–437. In JSTOR Carl R. Weinberg, Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: