Section 9,—“the Militia, When Called Into Actual Service of the United

States, shall be subject to the same rules and articles of war as the regular troops.” That is to say, for the time they are “on call,” they are virtually federal soldiers.

The law as amended by Congress in May, 1908, provides “that every officer and enlisted man of the militia who shall be called forth in the manner hereinbefore prescribed shall be mustered for service without further enlistment.” [Italics in Report.]

“The call of the President will, therefore, of itself accomplish the transfer of the organized militia which is called forth by him from its state relations to its federal relations. It becomes part of the Army of the United States and the President becomes its commander-in-chief.

“The President is the exclusive judge of the existence of an emergency which would justify the calling forth of the Organized Militia.”

This law contains twenty-six sections, every one of which should be studied carefully by the working class of the United States. The Union labor bodies should urge local newspapers to publish parts of the law selected by the unions. The more the law is examined the more food for reflection will be found in it.

The English capitalist government has also recently enacted a new military law, a species of “Dick” law, called the Territorial Force Act. This law transforms a “voluntary citizen soldier” into a “regular” soldier. Says Justice:

“Under the new act the Volunteer must ‘enlist’ and serve under ‘military law.’ He will be as much a regular soldier as a Life Guard or a Lancer, and can be called out to shoot down strikers in labor disputes as was actually done at Featherstone ... and at Belfast only a few months ago.”

“The Volunteer,” says the Morning Post, “will no longer be a citizen soldier, he will be a soldier without the blur of citizenship.... He may be mechanic; many of the best Volunteers are mechanics. If there is a strike in his works, ordered by the trade union to which he subscribes, and if the Mayor is afraid of the Strikers, and wants soldiers to shoot them, in case of need, the Volunteer, renamed ‘man of the Territorial Force,’ is just the man he wants; and the bill empowers the Mayor to call him out for the purpose.”

The “Dick” law was passed by capitalist “friends of labor,” of course, both Republicans and Democrats; and the “Territorial Force Act” was similarly passed by capitalist “friends of labor,” both Liberals and Conservatives. As the unarmed army of the unemployed grows threateningly larger and the armed army of bribed butchers grows larger—ready to murder those who starve—it is in order, in “Old England,” in “New America,” everywhere in order, for the working class to give more careful attention to the “good men” who are so tearfully and fearfully “friendly to labor.”

(=12=) Why should the working class give the capitalist governments a free hand in the murder of the workers? Why not rigorously restrict the power to call millions of men to arms?

What would happen if the working class should refuse to fight?

“That ‘the government can not put the whole population in prison, and if it could, it would still be without material for an army, and without money for its support,’ is an almost irrefutable argument. We see here [‘in passive resistance, not simply in theory, but in practice’] at least the beginnings of a sentiment that shall, if sufficiently developed, make war impossible to an entire people....”

Five points to be emphasized here:

(1) Require all the school teachers to teach all the children to despise and hate war.

(2) Arm everybody or nobody.

(3) Train everybody or nobody.

(4) “The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.”—Constitution of the United States: Third Amendment.

(5) The working class should diligently study the folly of requiring one regiment of the working class to fight the united and class-loyal capitalist class in strikes.

These five propositions suggest a plan that would, even under capitalism, render the working class far less helpless and hopeless than they are at present in their class struggle against the capitalist class of masters who may legally order the working class soldiers to fire on the working class.

However, the triumphantly effective work can be accomplished in this matter when—and not until—the working class have seized the powers of government. (See Chapter Ten, which is wholly devoted to the fundamentals of “What to do.”)

It is significant that the first Secretary of War, Henry Knox, appointed by President Washington, made a Report January 18, 1790, on the proper basis for the military defense of the United States. His plan was “to reject a standing army, as possessing too fierce an aspect and being hostile to the principles of liberty.”

A scholar of world-renown, Francis Lieber, German-American soldier, historian, economist and publicist, has this to say of standing armies:

“Standing armies are not only dangerous to civil liberty because depending upon the executive. They have the additional evil effect that they infuse into the whole nation ... a spirit directly opposed to that which ought to be the general spirit of a free people devoted to self-government. Habits of disobedience and contempt for the citizens are produced, and a view of government is induced which is contrary to liberty, self-reliance, self-government.... Where the people worship the army, an opinion is engendered as if courage in battle were really the highest phase of humanity; and the army, in turn, more than aught else, leads to the worship of one man—so detrimental.”

(=13=) “For the French and Italians and especially the German and Russian adolescent of the lower classes ... the army is called ... the poor man’s university.”

“The poor man’s university!”—in which he is drilled and kicked into spineless subserviency and is taught the noble art of killing himself, his class, scientifically. The degraded, docile, and despised millions of the working class men of the standing armies of the world are indeed educated when they are willing to wade in their own blood in defense of the parasitic capitalist class who rule, ride and ruin the toilers of all the world.

A standing army is a joke and a yoke on the working class. A standing army is a compound human machine educated to spank the working class when it cries for milk—and bread and meat. A soldier, a militiaman, is an educated boot with which the employers kick the working class.

(=14=) Do not rich men’s sons sometimes voluntarily join the militia?

Yes, sometimes—but very, very rarely. One of the bluest-blooded Vanderbilts of New York was recently a captain in a specially handsome Regiment. But, mark you—in ninety-nine cases in a hundred, well-armed, well-trained militiamen fight unarmed, untrained workingmen (and women), which is not so very, very dangerous—for the militiamen. To an intelligent rich man an unarmed wage-earner on strike for an extra nickel to buy bread, as “the enemy,” and an armed trained soldier whose business is murder, as “the enemy,”—these look different, you know.

For years New York millionaires and all the other “best people” “pointed with pride” to the famous Seventh Regiment of the National Guard, the “rich men’s regiment,” the “gilt-edged regiment” of lovely young millionaires, many of whom rode to the armory for drill in their automobiles. This regiment of the American nobility of lard-and-tallow-steel-coal-and-railway millionaires, ready at any moment to defend and save the dear country from “the enemy,”—this regiment was, indeed, the pride of the village called New York. These glistening patricians taught the common people patriotism. “So they did.”

Until the Spanish War broke out.

Then these fakir patriots—what did they do—then?

Resigned.

Or they did what amounted to the same thing—voted not to go to the war.

Certainly they did. Promptly, too—and intelligently.

Why not?

Surely you do not expect a lot of intelligent men to leave their happy homes, go to hell and make themselves ridiculous, do you? Why, the cost of a rubber tire for one wheel of an automobile would pay the war wages of a cheap man of the “lower classes” for six months.

(=15=) “Didn’t one millionaire go to the war in Cuba?”

Yes. Out of our six thousand patriotic, flag-waving millionaires, one, just one, a young green one, went to the war in Cuba—“for a little excitement and a lark,” he said. He found large quantities of excitement “all right,” and some cold lead. He was killed. As a millionaire “patriotically” going to war his case is an exception, clearly an exception, a conspicuously lonely, vain and stupid exception; and that exception will never be imitated. Too much intelligence—among the millionaires. Even his millionaire friends laughed at him for going to war. But he wanted a “hot time.” He got the “hot time”—and the cold lead.

There were several thousand other millionaire flag-wavers instructively conspicuous in that war—by their intelligent patriotic absence.

IT IS INSTRUCTIVELY SIGNIFICANT THAT THE CAPITALIST NEWSPAPERS GAVE MORE THAN A HUNDRED TIMES AS MUCH SPACE TO THE DEATH OF THE ONE MILLIONAIRE SOLDIER IN THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR AS THEY GAVE TO THE DEATH OF ANY HUNDRED HUMBLE WORKING CLASS SOLDIERS WHO WERE SLAUGHTERED IN THE SAME WAR.

(=16=) Were not some of the rich men of today soldiers at one time—“years ago”?

Yes. Some of the rich men of today were soldiers at one time—years ago; but they are not soldiers now when they are rich, and they were not rich when, years ago, they were soldiers.

(=17=) If politicians do not go to war, what about Mr. Bryan’s case? Didn’t Mr. Bryan patriotically go to the war in Cuba?

No. Mr. Bryan did not go to the war in Cuba. He simply went toward the war.

Mr. Bryan was, of course, patriotic, fervently, noisily so; but, like the intelligent people of his class, he always had his enthusiasm under perfect control. Mr. Bryan at no time showed an unmanageable desire to get up close in front, on the firing line. And his class was true to him, respected his strong preference for war five hundred miles from the flaming, snarling Gatling gun; and, accordingly, his class—in power at Washington—kept him well out of danger. At one time he got the impression he was in danger of being sent to the front. At once he cried out, “It’s politics!” and promptly resigned his noble command, double quick, patriotically. Mr. Bryan, mounted on a splendid horse, with uplifted sword in hand, grandly vowing to “defend the flag against the enemy” as he headed his noble braves, assembled for review, and admiration, before the Omaha Bee building, ready to start toward the front—at that sublime moment Colonel William Jennings Bryan was, well, simply beautiful, not to say pretty. As the golden tones of this Nebraskan Achilles, this Alexander from the Platte Valley, rolled forth in his heroic vow to bleed (if necessary) for his flag, the nation was comforted—felt saved already.

Patriotism is, after all, worth all it costs—that is, worth all it costs Mr. Bryan. Mr. Bryan, like Mr. Hearst and many others, is patriotic, even intemperately so—with his mouth.

But the reader may ask, “Was not Mr. Roosevelt in the Cuban War a case of a politician actually on the firing line?”

Clearly an exception. Name a few other “great statesmen” or international noises who went to the Cuban War—to the actual firing line.

Mr. Roosevelt loves excitement and danger. And what indescribable dangers there were for the Americans in the Cuban War! The mightiest “republic” on earth was pitted against the most toothless, decadent old political grandma in Europe. The dangers?—equal to those that threaten an armed, athletic hunter alone and face to face with a sucking fawn. Mr. Roosevelt himself has heroically—and carefully—recounted and printed his own brave deeds in that war. With Christian love and humility, with charming modesty and delicacy, with the diffident ingenuousness of a blushing schoolgirl, characteristic of him, Mr. Roosevelt tenderly recites one of his noble deeds as follows:

“Lieutenant Davis’s First Sergeant, Clarence Gould, killed a Spaniard with his revolver.... At about the same time I also shot one.... Two Spaniards leaped from the trenches ... not ten yards away. As they turned to run I closed in and fired twice, missing the first and killing the second [Oh, joy!].... At the same time I did not know of Gould’s exploit, and I supposed my feat to be unique.”

Surely it requires courage, rare and noble courage, for a wealthy graduate of Harvard University to boast in print that he shot a poor, ignorant fleeing Spanish soldier—very probably a humble working man drafted to war, torn from his weeping wife and children—that he shot such a man, in the back. Oh, bliss—elation—ecstasy divine! “I got him! with my revolver too! in the back!” Manly pastime of an American gentleman, a mongrel mixture of patrician and brute. Yes, reader, Mr. Roosevelt, politician, was in the Cuban War—with a purpose; and secured a military title and a “war record” worth at least 75,000 votes in his campaign for the governorship of New York which immediately followed the war. For details consult The Rough Rider. With shrewd patriotism, political foresight, rare courage—and girlish bashfulness—Mr. Roosevelt’s picture is repeatedly presented in the book, the poses expressing his usual audible modesty and ferocious gentleness.

Emerson finely says: “Every hero becomes a bore at last.”

(=18=) The noble Professor Paulsen (Berlin University) wrote:

“Hate impels men to seek quarrels, and pride turns their heads.... Nay, arrogance and hatred are really always the signs of an irritable, diseased self-consciousness.... selfish, arrogant, vain and narrow-minded self-conceit, which the flatterers of the popular passion call patriotism.”

The distinguished Italian historian, G. Ferrero, has written:

“Thus in destroying or creating, man can procure for himself strong emotions, and persuade himself of his own superiority.... Two passions have divided the human heart throughout the annals of human history: the divine passion for creation, and the diabolical passion for destruction.... Nineteenth-century man may seek after violent and inebriating emotions that permit him to assert his superiority over his fellows....”

Robert G. Ingersoll understood the hero-brute mongrel:

“Courage without conscience is a wild beast. Patriotism without principle is the prejudice of birth, the animal attachment to place.”

Thus Victor Hugo:

“To be, materially, a great man, to be pompously violent, to reign by virtue of the sword-knot and cockade ... to possess a genius for brutality—this is to be great, if you will, but it is a coarse way of being great.”

The cannon’s roar, the bayonet’s thrust, the crush of flesh, the splash of blood,—such things in battle make men gentle, tender, gallant, even heroic, fit subjects for the adoration of women. For example: When the Christian heroes captured Magdeburg:

“Now began a scene of massacre and outrage which history has no language, and poetry no pencil, to portray. Neither the innocence of childhood nor the helplessness of old age, neither youth nor sex, neither rank nor beauty, could disarm the fury of the conquerors. Wives were dishonored in the very arms of their husbands, daughters at the feet of their parents, and the defenseless sex exposed to the double loss of virtue and life.... Fifty-three women were found in one church with their heads cut off. The Croats amused themselves by throwing children into the flames, and Pappenheim’s Walloons with stabbing infants at their mothers’ breasts.”

But it may be said that those things were done far back in the seventeenth century. Consider, then, the fact that in the French civil war of 1871 the government’s noble heroes, having conquered the revolutionists, took thousands of unarmed prisoners—men, women, and children—to an open space at the city limits of Paris and shot them, children and all; in many cases the brave, armed ruffians stood up rows of helpless prisoners one behind the other and amused themselves by testing their rifles on living human flesh, noting how many men, women and children could be butchered with one bullet. Many of the “better class,” “refined ladies and gentlemen,” “leading citizens,” conspicuous by their elegance of manners and dress, were present watching the fun, smiling encouragement and making helpful suggestions to the “civilized” butchers.

And still more recently:

A British hero thus describes a “funny” incident in the South African war: “Really, sir, I never saw anything quite so funny in all my life. Just fancy, I saw a Kaffir woman pick up the headless body of her baby and strap it on her back. Funny, oh, Lord! It makes me laugh when I think of it now.” The same authority (the Westminster Review, quoted by Walter Walsh) also gives the following case of Christian military heroism: “A contingent of German scouts [in South Africa] took five native women prisoners ... an officer ordered ten men to fix bayonets. Five stood in front and five behind the women, and stabbed the women to death.” Ten armed, Christian heroes with bayonets ripping the breasts of five unarmed women. Great! Isn’t it? At least it is war. One scarcely knows which to despise the more—the soldiers or the lazy parasites for whom they committed a thousand crimes of basest cruelty and cowardice. Dr. Walter Walsh lets the soldiers tell in their own heroic language of their manly deeds—thus:

“‘Our progress was like the old-time forays in Scotland two centuries ago.... We moved on from valley to valley ... burning, looting and turning out the women and children to sit and cry beside the ruins of their once beautiful farmsteads ... my men fetched bundles of straw. The women cried, and the children stood holding to them and looking with large frightened eyes at the burning house.... The people had thought we had come for refreshments, and one of them went to get milk.... We then set the whole place on fire. They dropped on their knees and prayed and sang, weeping bitterly the while. One of the poor women went raving mad. When the flames burst from the doomed place the poor woman threw herself on her knees, tore open her bodice, and bared her breasts, screaming, “Shoot me, shoot me, I’ve nothing to live for, now that my husband is gone, and our farm is burnt, and our cattle taken!”’”

These foul deeds are samples of thousands.

“War, is it?” says Dr. Walsh. “Be it war: then an army is a manufactory for cowards and a school for cowards.”

“A war hero,” says the distinguished Roman Catholic Bishop John Spaulding, “supposes a barbarous condition of the race; and when all shall be civilized, they who know and love the most shall be held to be the greatest and the best.”

And Robert Ingersoll thus:

“Every good man, every good woman, should try to do away with war, to stop the appeal to savage force. Man in a savage state relies upon his strength, and decides for himself what is right and what is wrong.”

“Nothing is plainer,” says Emerson, “than that sympathy with war is a juvenile and temporary state.”

Dr. John Fiske, historian and philosopher, makes the following observations on the slow grand march from brutality to brotherhood.

“For thousands of generations, and until very recent times, one of the chief occupations of men has been to plunder, bruise and kill one another. The ... ugly passions ... have had but little opportunity to grow weak from disuse. The tender and unselfish feelings, which are a later product of evolution, have too seldom been allowed to grow strong from exercise ... the whims and prejudices of militant barbarism are slow in dying out.... The coarser forms of cruelty are disappearing and the butchery of men has greatly diminished ... in the more barbarous times the hero was he who had slain his thousands.... And thus we see what human progress means. It means throwing off the brute inheritance, gradually throwing it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggles needless. Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state ... toward an ultimate social state in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The ape and the tiger in human nature will be extinct.”

How encouraging! We can confidently look forward to a time when not even a pervert candidate for the presidency of a great Christian “republic” will be either tiger enough to butcher a human being or peacock and monkey enough to brag of doing so.

“Who loves war for war’s own sake Is fool, or crazed, or worse.”—Tennyson.

“One of the commonest popular mistakes is to confound aggressiveness and belligerency with genius. These qualities are almost in inverse proportion.... But usually great energy and determination, and especially combative qualities are associated with rather meagre abilities.”

There is really too much bull-dog greatness.

“No blood-stained victory, in story bright, Can give the philosophical mind delight; No triumph please, while rage and death destroy: Reflection sickens at the monstrous joy.”

“Cursed is the man, and void of law and right; Unworthy property, unworthy light, Unfit for public rule, or private care,— That wretch, that monster, who delights in war.”

Imagine a Sioux Indian chief, pagan Alexander, pagan Caesar, Christian Napoleon, also the Christian bullies Emperor William and Theodore Roosevelt, also the quiet Christ—imagine these seven “not only willing, but anxious to fight,” mounted on foam-stained horses galloping across a bloody battlefield strewn with wounded and slaughtered men and boys, imagine these seven galloping, bravely and boisterously galloping, waving red-stained swords, yelling, squawking, yawping, hurrahing for war, “glorious” war—the iron-shod hoofs of their rushing horses crushing into the breasts and faces of dead and dying young men and boys.

The savage Sioux, the immortal pagan brutes Alexander and Caesar, the renowned Christian bullies Napoleon, William and Theodore—these six “geniuses,” these coarse-grained, blood-stained egotists fit that picture perfectly, as a shark fits the ocean, as a wolf fits the forest, as a tiger fits the jungle, as a savage fits a cannibal feast,—as the Devil fits Hell.

But Christ, Christ in whose breast lurked no tiger and no savage,—Christ with a long sword, a hero’s butcher-knife in hand, plunging it into the breast of his brothers, screaming like the “dee-lighted” brute, calling it “great,” “splendid,” “bully!”—

Impossible!

But why impossible for Christ and “dee-lightful” for the other six?

Because, simply because, these six blood-lusting heroes are savage or at best only civilized; but Christ was socialized.

Socialization opposes assassination—both wholesale and retail.

Christ is immortal—by his wide love and brotherhood.

The “great general” is promoted and immortalized for his narrow hates and brilliant brutalities.

(=19=) Has not war been natural and necessary in the life of the human race, and has not war been a potent factor in the intellectual development of mankind?

Professor Ferrero has this to say:

“Thus the duty of every well-meaning man today is to diffuse knowledge of the fact that war no longer serves the purpose it once served in the struggle for civilization.

“War necessary to civilization?”

Well, for a long time in the life of the human race nature was so ill understood, man had such insufficient knowledge and control of nature, that it was extremely difficult to get a living for all. Our ancestors naturally quarreled; perhaps it was necessary for some of them to kill others in order that some of them might live—ignorant as the people were in those times of how to make nature yield bountifully and easily for all. And no doubt the struggle developed the race—the part that did not get killed. In those struggles were developed, at first, strong muscles, skin-ripping claws or knife-like finger-nails, tusks in the mouth, and thick skins; and, later, clubs, spears, cross-bows, bows-and-arrows; and still later, rifles, cannon, battleships and lignite shells, and also the methods and tactics of struggle;—all these were developed. Always, too, cunning, deception, malignance, egoism, egotism, coarse-grained dispositions, cheap ambitions, swaggering manners, fierce eyes, and the soft, bull-like military voices and hero worship—all these were developed.

The muscles and the mentality thus developed are still extremely useful. Indeed, the mentality, developed in war (but neither wholly nor chiefly in war), is worth all it cost, whatever it did cost, because with this godlike mentality, and only with this mentality, we can now have the higher and finer forms and phases of life, the pleasures that distinguish man from the brutes; that is, with this mentality we can have these more glorious forms of life: Provided, that the low cunning, deception, malignance, egoism, egotism and the coarse-grained strain of the ancient brute are not even yet too strong in our veins and characters. In spite of one’s intelligence he may be “not only willing, but anxious to fight.” Such a person may no longer have the skin-ripping finger-claws, but he has the skin-ripping disposition that was developed when the skin-ripping finger-claws were developed, and developed in the same way.

Now, of course, we still need the muscle and the intelligence, every one of us. But we do not any longer need the skin-rippers, or the tusks, or the club, the “big stick,” the spear, the bow and arrow, the rifle and the battleship; nor do we any longer need the arrogant egotism, the cheap cunning, the prize-fighter ambitions or the tiger’s readiness to take blood. Nor should we any longer need the ancient method of struggle, every-fellow-for-himself, in the industrial process of life—in a rationally organized society, with our present control of nature. And we should no longer enjoy any of these brute means and methods if we were civilized in the noblest sense, that is, if we were decently socialized.

“Are you ready for the question?” This is the question:

Can you use, do you prefer to use—your developed mentality like a brute, like a savage, or like a truth-seeking, socialized man? Are you “not only willing, but anxious to fight,” or are the business and the methods of the brute disgusting to you? What o’clock is it in your personal evolution? Do you prefer a library to an armory, books rather than bayonets? Is a fight natural, or necessary, or helpful in your personal development? If a fight, actual part in a fight rifle-in-hand, is not necessary to the preacher, the senator, the professor, the banker or the manufacturer, why should it seem necessary in your case—and why should you permit these “better class” citizens to have you ordered and led around like a prize-winning bull-dog to fight in the international prize-ring called the struggle for the world market? War as a developer and a civilizer is a flat failure in your case if the capitalist class can seduce you for fifty cents a day to fight for a foreign market for American porter-house steak while you and your father and mother are fed on third-rate meat, beans, cheap syrup and mock-coffee without cream. Brother, you may indeed be a “brave boy,” and a “good shot,” and you may have heroically stained your hands in other men’s blood; but, really, the “upper class” have marked you as an easy victim, a useable cheap “guy” of the “lower class.”

(=20=) John Ruskin keenly appreciated the capitalist’s craftiness and the workingman’s buffoonery in “a war for civilization.” He wrote:

“Capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money, persuade the peasants that the said peasants want guns to shoot each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow guns, out of the manufacture of which the capitalists get a percentage, and men of science much amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a certain number of each other until they get tired, and burn each other’s houses down in various places. Then they put the guns back into towns, arsenals, etc., in ornamental patterns, and the victorious party put also some ragged flags in churches. And then the capitalists tax both annually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan of the guns and powder.”

The Italian historian Ferrero sees the swinish snout of the ruling class greed in the wars of three thousand years of “civilization.” He writes:

“During those thirty centuries from which dates our historical knowledge, war has been more a social system than a cruel pastime for kings—the first most violent and brutal means adopted by ruling minorities to acquire wealth.”

(=21=) Is it said that wars always have been and always will be?

That wars always have been is an unproved proposition.

That “wars always will be” depends upon the working class. The clouds of confusion are clearing from the mind of the working class. A revolution is ripening in the toilers’ thought on war.

(=22=) Is it said by the leading citizens that wars are necessary in order to kill off the surplus population?

If wars are necessary for such purpose, why not have Mr. Leading Citizen and his friends classified as a part of the surplus population on the ground that they are criminally unsocial, and have them taken out to the battlefield and forced to shoot one another? The theory of having the surplus population killed off would thus quickly lose its popularity with the “upper classes.”

(=23=) It may be said that the Napoleonic wars removed more than 7,500,000 men from competition in the labor market; and it might be argued by the working man that since war reduces the competition among the workers, the working class should on this account welcome war.

Let us see: If four men are competing for two jobs, should two of them be satisfied, and even glad, to have the competition for the jobs reduced by having the other two climb upon their backs and cease to bid for the jobs? It should be kept distinctly in mind that the workers who do not go to war support those who do go to war—always, everywhere, absolutely no exceptions.

(=24=) There is a somewhat popular, and simian, assumption that in war—even in beautiful Christian war—the results are “the survival of the fittest,” meaning, in the case of modern wars, the survival of “the more highly civilized,” also the biologically “best.”

Of course a “bullet carefully selects its victim.”

And do not statesmen tell us on the Fourth of July all about the “splendid intelligence” and the “noble spirit” and the “superiority” of the “brave boys who died in battle”?

Does not the recruiting officer try to get the soundest men for slaughter?

Let the orthodox worshippers answer: Is pagan Japan more fit for survival than Christian Russia?

What show for survival would Belgium have in a contest with Turkey, Spain or Russia?

(=25=) A kindred and stupid assumption in all wars is this: Might makes right.

But if might makes right between two warring nations, then why does not might make right when a strong man by force compels a weaker man to hand over his pocket-book?

(=26=) A Scotch philosopher on the “brave boys”:

“Omitting much, let us impart what follows: Horrible enough! A whole march-field strewed with shell-splinters, cannon-shots, ruined tumbrils and dead men and horses; stragglers remaining not so much as buried. And those red mound-heaps: aye, there lie the Shells of Men, out of which the life and virtue have been blown; and now they are swept together and crammed down out of sight, like blown Eggshells!... How has thy breast, fair plain, been defaced and defiled! The green sward is torn up, hedge-rows and pleasant dwellings blown away with gunpowder, and the kind seed-field lies a desolate Place of Skulls. Nevertheless, Nature is at work ... all that gore and carnage will be shrouded in, absorbed into manure....

“What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and upshot of the war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain ‘natural enemies’ of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them up to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain, and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans—in like manner wending their ways; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition, and thirty stand facing thirty, each with his gun in hand. Straightway the word ‘Fire!’ is given, and they blow the souls out of one another; and in the place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for.

“Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them.

“How then?

“Simpleton! Their governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one another, had these poor blockheads shoot.”

(=27=) In that part of biology treating of parasitic life the technical terms “host” and “guest” are used. The host is the living thing that furnishes a living not only for itself, but also for the life-filching intruder which fastens itself upon the body of the “host.” The intruder, the robber residing upon the body of the “host,” is the “guest,” that is, the parasite.

Now one of the strangest things in the entire live world is this: When in some life-forms a certain stage of parasitism is reached, when the guest has permanently fastened itself upon the body of the host and the host has become thoroughly accustomed to and adjusted to the parasitic arrangement, the host stupidly inclines to defend the parasitic guest. It is remarkable (and discouraging) that this law of nature, this tendency, is found in operation in the social life of man. For thousands of years multitudes of men, women and children have been held in the grip of this law, mentally strangled in their effort to think Justice and Freedom; the vast majority of the working class are always quickly and easily rendered “peaceful,” “law-abiding,” and “satisfied,” and “patriotic.” Millions of chattel slaves have “loyally” defended their parasitic masters. Millions of serfs have “loyally” defended their landlords-and-masters. And today tens of millions of wage-earners strongly incline to “loyally” defend their parasitic employer masters. Moreover, the employer, by craftily praising the wage-earner, can induce the wage-earner to ignorantly, blindly, stupidly praise and defend not only the employer, but also the whole wage-system of robbery and social parasitism. Not only that, the employers, by controlling certain institutions such as the school, the library, the press, and the lecture platform, can have the wage-earning hosts taught to teach their own children to defend and praise the parasitic employer guests and the parasitic social system under which their lives are belittled by being sucked up as rent, interest and profits and fed to the parasitic capitalist class.

What the employer calls a contented and loyal working man is simply a stupidly acquiescent “host,” biologically considered. And a working class man with a rifle in his hand defending the class that, as social parasites, rob the working class—such a workingman is the best possible illustration of the fact that the great laws of nature are careless of the so-called “dignity of man,” totally careless of the ridiculous spectacle of a human being reverting to the behavior of creatures far, far down below even the simian cousins of the human race. Nature does not care whether a man behaves like a crab or a sucker, a tiger or a monkey, a sycophantic slave or a defiantly self-respecting man.

(=28=) Toward the prideless working class as a social “host” defending the ruling class, the defended ruling class take nature’s contemptuous attitude. And the working-class soldier as professional defender of the parasitic capitalist class, tho’ much flattered, is cordially despised.

What the United States government thinks of the soldier may be seen, for example, in the fact that a Civil Service employee, in the Weather Department, travelling about on duty on long trips, is allowed one dollar, and even more than a dollar per meal in his expense account; while the “brave boys” in khaki who agree to stand ready to butcher their brothers for a living are lucky if they get a thirty-cent meal at any time. In this connection the following from Mr. Taft’s Report as Secretary of War for 1907 (p. 92–93) is of interest. Under the head of “Rations” we find:

“The present ration, while liberal and suitable, falls considerably short of the Navy ration in variety. Butter, milk and molasses, or syrup, at least, should be added to the garrison ration. These are articles almost necessary in the preparation of desserts.... They are part of the ration in Alaska and they should be everywhere.”

The present ration “liberal and suitable,” yet lacking butter, milk and molasses and even syrup. Such things are “almost necessary!”

The reckless epicureanism thus proposed by “the great secretary” in offering some cheap syrup as an addition to the dessert gives us an illuminating suggestion as to the War Department’s estimate of the cheapness of the hungry greenhorn who can be lured into the rulers’ “service” with cheap syrup. An ordinary house fly can be coaxed into a trap with syrup—good syrup.

The United States soldier’s meals are estimated by the War Department to be worth six and two-thirds cents apiece, as will appear from the following passage taken from the Report of the War Department for 1907, page 85: “The pay of the private, at present, is 43 and one-third cents a day. Adding the [daily] cost of his ration as 20 cents, clothing allowance and right to quarters each at 15 cents, and his remaining privileges at, say, six and two-thirds cents, his present pay still falls 25 cents short of the average laborer throughout the United States.” This is the War Department’s estimate of the soldier’s average total daily income in cash and allowances, made by the Department in order to compare the soldier’s incentive with that of the farm hand and general day laborer. On page 84 of the same Report is the Government’s estimate of the average daily income of the “farm and the general laborer”: For 1902 the average for these two classes was (according to the Report) $1.20 a day; and “allowing for the increase in wages since 1902” the government’s estimate for the “farm and general laborer” in 1907 was $1.25 per day. This, the Report says, is $7.50 per month better than the soldier’s incentive in 1907.

It is matter of common knowledge that the United States soldiers and marines are forced to spend a considerable portion of their cash incomes for food that the Government is too stingy to furnish. That is, the ruling class have such contempt for their human “watch dogs” that they furnish them a meaner living than is received by the most meanly paid group of the working class over whom they stand guard and stand ready to murder if they strike and struggle for more.

In the same Report, under the heading “Quarters,” is this:

“The fact that he is living in a $40,000 building impresses the soldier less if he finds in it only iron bunks, cheap chairs, and unpainted tables—the absolute necessities for his use and nothing for his comfort. The barrack is the home of the soldier while he remains in the service. It is possible that he might think oftener of continuing there if it presented more the appearance of a home. So far as the squad rooms are concerned, mere room adornment is neither necessary nor advisable [!] ... The squad rooms are sleeping rooms only. There is space only for bunks, lockers and a few chairs; but these last might in part be something more than the present cheap and uncomfortable article. But it is the reading and amusement rooms that are meant particularly. There is no reason why they should not be made habitable. [Indeed! Really, Mr. Taft! How daring of you!] A few barrack chairs and rough tables, with possibly a billiard table, ordinarily constitute their furniture now. There is little to tempt a man to stay there. [“Tempt” is good.] ... These rooms might be made comfortable and pleasant. A rug on the floor, a few prints on the walls, substantial chairs, a few writing tables and writing materials could all be supplied at no serious expense to the United States.... There is nothing degenerating in such furnishings; there is much that is homelike.” [Like whose home?]

“A few prints”—not many of course, and cheap ones, let us say about ten cents each; and “a rug”—a dull, unexciting mat of rags—simply these and nothing more, lest the degenerating influences of fine art should soften the syrup-baited lads’ blood-lusting temper too much for the more glorious art of butchering. As Mr. Taft profoundly remarks, “There is little to tempt a man to stay there” at present; but, as he sagaciously suggests, about 98 cents expended in baiting the bunk-room trap with a few original Italian, or, say, Dutch, masterpieces, and a few imported Persian fascinations of emotional red—this 98 cents for the seductions of fine art added to a nickel’s worth of skimmed milk and molasses would be an effective allurement for the khaki heroes to re-enlist and “stay there.”

Recently Congressmen and Senators advanced their own salaries from $5,000 up to $7,500 per year. This is one sign of self-respect. This advance of $2,500 per year will of course be sufficient to provide a fair quality of syrup and skimmed milk for the statesmen’s dessert.

Does it seem probable that cheap molasses added to the dessert of the soldier’s ration and a few ten-cent prints hung on the walls of the soldiers’ living rooms will attract Taft’s sons or Roosevelt’s sons or the sons of Senators and Congressmen and the sons of the “better class leading citizens” to the dreary, barren barracks provided for men who stand ready to slaughter for less than 50 cents a day and cheap “keep”?

Says Major-General J. F. Bell, Chief of Staff:

“That men enlist believing they will love the life is likely, but their mental picture is oftentimes so different from the reality that disappointment is the almost inevitable consequence.”

Fifty-eight per cent. of all the desertions from the military service in the year 1906 were desertions of men in their first year of service, and considerably more than half of these desertions were during the first six months of service.

Twenty-six times as many enlisted men in our army committed suicide in 1908 as in 1907, and thirty-nine times as many of the “tempted” and trapped young men in our army committed suicide in 1909 as in 1907. No suicides are reported for the years 1901 to 1906 inclusive. The record for the three years 1907, ’08, ’09 is 1, 26, 39, respectively.

It would seem likely that a young fellow whose loathing for the army life had become unendurable would desert rather than commit suicide to escape the hideous business. But no doubt the following line from the Report of the Secretary of War, Mr. Wright, in 1908, will help explain somewhat the increase of suicide in the army. Mr. Wright says (page 19): “An elaborate system ... now almost perfected is well calculated to secure swift and certain apprehension and punishment of deserters and will ... have a marked effect in reducing the crime to a minimum.” An illustrative feature of this “highly perfected system” is to furnish the run-away soldiers’ pictures to the police of a city to which the lads can be traced, and offer the police $50 a head cash for the arrest of the soldiers. The $50 results in a human “bloodhound” search. This “highly perfected system” makes a young man’s enlistment a good deal like swallowing a barbed fish-hook. A great number of the boys go insane. In 1908 insanity ranked third in the long list of causes of discharge from the army for disability.

Army service, even in time of peace, is not exactly a picnic dream. On this point General Frederick Funston offers some helpful information, thus:

“There is too much of the everlasting grind of drill and practice marches, and at some of the posts too much ‘fatigue’ in the way of keeping the reservations in apple-pie order. It is pretty much of a shock to many of the men who have entered the army service to taste the delights of military life to find that, from the standpoint of the post-commanders, the most important part of their training consists in cutting brush and weeds.”

In his Report of 1907, page 14, Mr. Taft said:

“A noteworthy feature in the recruitment of the Army under present conditions is the increasing number of men who fail to re-enlist and of those who leave the Army before the expiration of their term of service by purchasing their discharge.... The fact cannot be disregarded nor explained away that for some reason or other the life of the soldier as at present constituted is not one to attract the best and most desirable class of men.”

In the excerpt just quoted Mr. Taft makes it pretty clear that in his judgment the present enlisted men in the “regular” army are “undesirable citizens.” Hence the “great secretary’s” recommendation of milk-and-syrup additions to the soldier’s dessert, a few cheap prints on the walls, and a coat of paint on the tables used by the soldiers—in order to catch a better and more desirable class of men; that is, a better and more desirable class of workingmen; for be it remembered the Government does not expect to get any well-fed capitalist class men into the army by means of cheap syrup and cheap milk and cheap ‘print’ pictures and the like. “The soldier in peace,” says the Report just quoted, “is better fed and better clothed than the average man of his class in civil life.” How interesting and instructive!

In 1905 almost 73 per cent., and in 1906 almost 74 per cent. of the applicants for examination for enlistment in our army “were rejected as lacking either mental, moral or physical qualifications.”

President Roosevelt, in his Message of December, 1907, virtually ridiculed the patriotism of the men in the army and those who may contemplate entering the army. He wrote:

“The prime need of our present Army and Navy is to secure and retain competent non-commissioned officers. The difficulty rests fundamentally on the question of pay.”

“Fundamentally on the question of pay.” How suggestively patriotic! Did Colonel Roosevelt join the army for the cash there was in it? “Oh, certainly not.” But why should he insultingly say that, for other men, joining the army is fundamentally a question of cold cash?

The War Department, with Mr. Taft at the head, in 1907, joined Mr. Roosevelt in his sneering contempt for the soldier’s motive in joining the army. The Report runs:

“Under a voluntary system men enlist either to aid their country or to promote their own ends; that is, through self-sacrifice or self-interest.... Self-sacrifice of this sort is patriotism, an emotion necessary to arouse.... To keep it through long periods of peace at a pitch high enough to maintain an army would be impossible.... Self-interest is, therefore, the only cause of enlistment necessary to consider; ...”

It thus appears that, in the judgment of the “great secretary,” now President, patriotism is not at all a matter of brains, of reason steadily sustained by logic, but is, on the contrary, a matter of emotion, passion, “brain-storm,” induced with fife and drum and sustained with godlike sky-climbing aspiration to have one’s stomach filled with “butter, milk and molasses, or syrup, at least”—as “dessert.” The two Presidents, the anti-labor injunction judge and the lion-hunting monkey murderer, agree that what looks like patriotism in the long-service “regular” is after all simply a matter of getting less than fifty cents a day and “keep.” Of course, such things as this are not mentioned on the Fourth of July nor in campaign speeches when the “great secretary” or his chattering predecessor is courting the ‘brave boys’ for their votes.

(=29=) When a young man joins the army or the navy he virtually agrees to pocket his pride and submit to a series of insults from his “superior” officers for a term of years. The recruiting officer is to some degree, at least temporarily, a man of pleasant manners, and the callow patriot taking the bait in the recruiting office is treated alluringly. But when the youth signs his name in the books and becomes a soldier patriot, matters take a change. It is a case of being “stuck” or “stung.” For following the hour of his enlistment, humble, prideless submission to strutting, swaggering bosses is the soldier’s portion. From “superior” officers he must meekly accept insults for which, in private life, he would promptly knock a man down. In the service he must bend his neck and take the yoke for years. Here is a sample of the spirit of the haughty airs assumed by the “superiors.”

Mr. Taft, speaking as Secretary of War, February 14, 1908, to the young men at West Point Military School, said:

“The plainest of your duties is to keep your mouths shut and obey orders. As a soldier you must forego the privilege of free speech.... You will meet with injustices, others will get all to which they seem entitled. Your wives will have heart-burnings. Your children will have heart-burnings. In spite of all that you must do your duty, honestly and devotedly.”

Here is a soldier’s letter:

“... We are supposed to work eight hours a day, but we get dismissed when the officers see fit to let us go—all for fifty-two cents a day. The negroes working at Panama get more money and are better treated than the enlisted men out here. Our ‘little brown brothers’ are treated better over here. And to cap the climax, over comes a high statesman [Mr. Taft?] and makes a speech to a mob of our ‘little brown brothers’ and tells them not to judge the Americans by the enlisted men, as the enlisted men are composed of the roughest elements in the States....”

President David Starr Jordan (Leland Stanford University) writes of the contemptuous treatment of the men in the ranks by the “superior” officers:

“One soldier [in the Philippines] says, ‘If the United States were on fire from end to end, I would never raise my hand to put it out.’ Another would ‘toss in a blanket the officials at Washington, as we toss a cheating corporal.’ Another says in print, referring to the abuse of the soldiers by their superiors in pay: ‘Yes, I knew that war would be hell before I got into it. But I did not know that war would be hell deliberately and fanatically inflicted. I expected to sleep in mud puddles with my head on a stone for a pillow, and go hungry for days on forced marches and away from a base of supplies. But I never dreamed that I would have to sleep in a leaky and exposed shed when there was plenty of good shelter elsewhere, and when thirty officers had fine apartments in which there was room for five hundred men; neither did I expect to be fed on coffee-grounds and foul canned meat for weeks when we were right next to a base of supplies, and when our officers lived on the choice of the commissary’s department.’”

But the question naturally occurs to one: Why shouldn’t the working class soldiers be treated thus? Surely it is to be expected that the great majority class will get what they permit from their “superiors.”

Note how the soldier boys are snubbed and bull-dozed in the German army. Says Dr. Walsh:

“In a trial reported Dec. 17, 1903, a lieutenant of the infantry has been convicted of 618 cases of maltreatment and 57 cases of improper treatment of soldiers under him, and a sergeant in another regiment has been convicted of 1,520 cases of maltreatment and 100 cases of improper treatment.... The men deposed were so afraid, that nobody ventured to complain.”

There is a yearly average of 7,000 desertions from the English regular army. Quite naturally. Frozen, starved and despised, the thirty-cent patriots make a break for bread and freedom from the “noble” snobbery of the aristocratic pets in control.

The record of desertions from the American Army is, for the years 1907, 1908, and 1909, respectively, 4,534, 4,525, 5,023.

(=30=) How is it possible to interest young men in the brutal business of war?

There are some paragraphs on this matter in the chapter following, “For Mother and the Boys.” Here the matter of military parades is suggested for consideration by “father and the boys.”

Sometimes the boys’ interest in war begins in so simple a thing as a parade. A military parade is a trap—for the working class. A writer in the New York Tribune, April 22, 1908, makes several artful suggestions as to the value of military parades in snaring young toilers into the army. He suggests:

That “parades, so far as circumstances permit, be through or near ... sections [of the city] ... where they may encourage enlistment among a ... class of prospective recruits ... instead of on Riverside Drive [where the ‘better classes’ live], to which the public has access with difficulty and which is not frequented by the class of young men to whom the National Guard appeals.... These suggestions reflect the views of many citizens ... with whom the writer has conferred.”

The writer also points out that bright-colored uniforms for the paraders have excellent effect on the imagination of the prospective recruits.

There can be no doubt that the masters are well aware of the hypnotizing influence of marching loud, gay-colored bands, festively uniformed infantry, and fascinating cavalrymen through the streets where they may be seen and admired by the working class, admired by many thousands of ill-fed, ill-clothed, meanly sheltered young men and women whose lives are dull and sad, consumed with the killing monotony and hurry of the factory. A cavalry captain in the United States Army, a part of whose business is to wheedle the gullibles into the dreary army life, has this to say of parades:

“The good influence in popularizing the army by having it stationed in large cities is exemplified in London. The various guards and other bodies of troops marching through the streets, preceded by their gorgeously dressed bands, all the uniforms recalling traditions of brave, gallant deeds, gain friends every time.”

The best known butcher of modern times (Napoleon) also understood this matter.

“You call these toys? Well, you manage men with toys!” said that red-stained egoist, speaking of the ribbons and crosses and other gewgaws of his Legion of Honor.

When at the street-side a boy of seven, watching a military parade, shouts in gleeful admiration and claps his small hands in happy hurrahs, Mars, the bloody god of war, begins to fasten his clutches on the little fellow, the child’s imagination takes fire with visions and hopes, his soul begins to thrill with the kill-lust, then and there he is being prepared to enlist—when he “gets big.” How different it would be for the small boys if, when soldiers were marched through a city, these armed slayers of their kind should march at night with all lights out and with the rumble of drums and the frequent boom of cannon in the darkness making the air tremble. The working class mother might well consider this matter. She has all to lose.

In the average parade-and-review the workingman is made ridiculous. Did you ever see prominent bankers or other “better class” business men in large numbers trudging along afoot in the middle of the dusty or muddy street, marching and sweating miles and miles past a gay-colored reviewing-stand to be “reviewed” and grinned at by a bunch of sugar-coated crooks in the “reviewers’ stand”? No! And you never will. The trudging and the sweating, as usual, are handed over to the “common people,” chiefly the wage-slaves. When the “very best people” do take part in the parading before the “grand-stand,” they ride, up front, in carriages or on horseback. They laugh and chat and gaily enjoy the stupid gullibility of the working men as the humble fellows are thus “bell-weathered” through the dirt and heat. On the occasion of a recent great parade in New York City a well-known capitalist gliding along in a handsome automobile swaggeringly called out, “We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and we’ve got the money too!” A seedy, hungry-looking young man proudly answered back, “You bet we have!” On the same occasion thousands of ten-dollar-a-week clerks and factory workers were charmed into hand-clapping as the gaudily dressed soldiers marched by carrying the very rifles they were ready to use to crush the admiring toilers if they should strike and struggle for justice.

The usual “review” is a pompous occasion on which hundreds or thousands of meek, ill-fed, cotton-lined, callous-palmed working men “hoof it” for an hour or so past a “reviewing-stand” occupied by some grinning, well-fed, silk-lined, lily-fingered, decorated “great” men who scorn even the thought of the working class having a political party of their own for their own self-defense.

(=31=) A great many fathers and sons are thinking a good deal about an “era of peace” to be ushered in mainly through the good offices of peace societies. The Hague Peace Conference is, in the judgment of many people, “the hope of the world.”

The first meeting of the Hague Conference was called—in Jesus’ name, of course—by the most infamous blood-stained butcher of feeble old men and women and thoughtful, aspiring young men and women, in all the world,—that is, by the Tsar of Russia. The sincerity of this crowned murderer may in some measure be realized by a brief study of his gross inconsistency in the year 1903 and in the years immediately preceding. (See Chapter Six, and Sixth Illustration.)

The second meeting of the Society was held in 1907, and another is scheduled for the year 1915.

The serene confidence the world’s rulers have in the Society is easily seen in their frantic efforts to increase their armies and navies. They are bleeding their people white with taxes to make the enormously expensive preparations for what is likely to be the most vast and terrible butchering of the working class by the working class that has ever horrified mankind. Secretly the crowned and uncrowned ruling butchers of the world have nothing but contempt for the Conference at The Hague. Very naturally, however, they are all shrewd enough to make a large and beautiful profession of faith and desire for peace through the Conference, while at the same time they all “want for soldiers young men who are not only willing, but anxious to fight.” The man who inaugurated the Conference promptly scorned the Conference when he believed his interests would be served by a war with Japan. The famous French anti-militarist G. Hervé shrewdly pointed out the hopelessly weak place in the “authority” of the capitalist Hague Peace Court:

“Governments so far are unanimous in withdrawing from The Hague Tribunal all questions affecting ‘the honor and vital interests of the country,’ a convenient formula permitting them to refuse arbitration when they please.”

And here is a frank admission:

“The Hague Tribunal has nothing compulsory about it; all its members are left in perfect freedom as to whether they submit questions to it or not.... In all treaties hitherto the Great Powers have retained power to withhold submission of questions affecting ‘their honor or vital interest.’”

“Honor and vital interests,”—convenient phrase—a matter of business—cash and commerce, “plain dollars and cents,”—under capitalism.

It is of interest to note that another peace society, The Peace Society, founded in London in 1816, has been busy for almost a hundred years trying to mop up the blood, so to speak, never daring, or not knowing how, to uncover the fundamental cause of war.

In at least some respects a “Conference” of The Hague Peace Society is, itself, hopelessly ridiculous and, in appearance, wickedly insincere. For example, at the “Conference” of 1907 the delegates learnedly and laughably discussed the “Humanizing of War,” and, after much brain-fagging effort, the delegates to the fakirs’ feast duly and heavily concluded as follows:

“It is especially prohibited to employ poison or poisoned arms.”

WELL BE IT KNOWN:—

THAT KLEPTOMANIACS’ PERIODICAL LUNCHEON, OR “THIEVES’ SUPPER,” CALLED THE HAGUE CONFERENCE, WOULD HAVE NO MORE WORK TO DO FOR THE NEXT THOUSAND YEARS, WOULD NEVER AGAIN HAVE ANYTHING WHATEVER TO MEET FOR, IF ALL BULLETS AND ALL SWORDS AND ALL BAYONETS USED IN ALL THE ARMIES WERE DIPPED IN A DEADLY POISON; FOR, IN THAT CASE, THE WORKING CLASS OF THE WHOLE WORLD WOULD FLATLY REFUSE TO VOLUNTEER OR BE DRAFTED TO SERVE IN ANY WAR ANYWHERE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. AND, OF COURSE, THE SOFT-VOICED, WELL-FED “HUMANIZERS OF WAR” WOULD NOT GO TO WAR—POISON OR NO POISON. THE UNIVERSAL USE OF POISONED BULLETS, SWORDS AND BAYONETS WOULD MAKE WAR ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE, BECAUSE THE INAUGURATION OF SUCH A POLICY WOULD MAKE THE WORKING CLASS THINK.

A thinking slave is the terror of the plunder-bloated rulers of the world—always.

When the workers once think about war they will promptly do two things:

First, They will refuse to go to war;

Second, They will find the cause of war, and will remove it.

Of course, it requires the deep and prayerful investigation of “great” and “prominent Christian” gentlemen in peace conference assembled to discover that it is wrong for men to butcher men with swords and bullets dipped in poison, but that it is not wrong for men to destroy men with clean lead and clean steel, their souls charged with hate as an adder’s fang jetting venom into its victim’s flesh; to discover that it is wrong to have soldiers thrust poison-dipped bayonets into one another’s stomachs, but that it is not wrong for a “Christian business men’s” government to feed its soldiers on poisoned canned beef. The poor dupes who butcher one another at the word of command are, of course, too “common” and ignorant to understand the logical legerdemain of these prayerfully discovered distinctions; but the learned and prominent gentlemen in peace conference assembled, far, far from the battle line, smoking 50–cent cigars, quaffing the world’s costliest champagne—these noble braves, these bottle-scarred heroes, can tell us all about it.

Certainly.

With thoughtful tenderness many Christian governments, influenced by peace societies, have made an international agreement that, in case of war, no bullet used weighing 14 ounces or less shall be an explosive bullet,—that is, a bullet that easily expands, flattens and shatters when it strikes flesh. However, these same “more refined and civilized” nations are all at perfect liberty to use a cannon bullet, or shell, weighing hundreds of pounds, charged with explosives, flesh-tearing materials and deadly gases, arranged with time-fuses in order to explode over the heads of, or among, a great body of men on the field, or in the midst of men when it has pierced the armor of a war vessel.

It is not definitely known how these wise Christian statesmen and scholars discovered that a three-hundred pound explosive bullet might properly and lovingly be used by gently sensitive Christian butchers, but that a thirteen-ounce explosive bullet might not with propriety be used by these loving followers of the gentle Jesus. Possibly the discovery was made by some deep-seeing pot-house statesmen and scholars after a prayerful study of the Sermon on the Mount,—with champagne on the side.

War is “human” or “inhuman” according to the orations, discussions, confusions, delusions, conclusions, decisions and provisions of these perfumed, patent-leathered fighters after a long fast—on terrapin, porter-house and “Mumm’s Extra Dry.”

The eloquence of the Hague Peace Conference literature concerning its long list of extremely “glorious achievements” would lead the uninstructed to suppose that till this organization came on the field there had never been a dispute settled without war. It modestly claims everything in view.

Note here the fact that:

“There is no period known to history in which instances are not found of arbitration as a substitute for force, and we can only wonder when we consider the historical antiquity of the former that the latter should have maintained its hold so long, so constantly and so fiercely.”

“Where are thy portents, Peace? What sign on land or sea Of thy great coming, of thy rule to be? The fighting and the drumming do not cease; Gun-thunder smites the air, And shakes the earth beneath. Bait we not the war-dogs in their lair, And toil at harvesting of dragon’s teeth?...

Must it forever be a poet’s dream— The land secure, the mind at rest, The cut-throat tamed and laboring at an oar, The braggart silent and ashamed, The toiler as a monarch seem, The woman with her baby at her breast, Aglow with joy that war shall be no more?...” —J. I. C. Clarke, in New York Times.

Prominent people—prominent chiefly because they are elevated upon the shoulders of the working class—have been talking about peace for a long time. But peace born of justice, peace founded upon fairness,—that is neither thought of nor talked of, by the ruling class, in the pompous and pretentious peace conferences; it is not on the program.

Father and the boys of the working class will themselves have to place peace on the program of mankind. And one of the first things to do is to bring up the subject of war and peace in every working class organization in the world—for discussion. (See pages 272, 283–289. Index: “Carnegie.”)

=A Special Notice to the Hague Peace Society:=

As to “limited armaments”—whether the swords are long or short, the working class more and more clearly see that you intend that the working class shall continue to do all the fighting in case of war.

=A Special Challenge to the Hague Peace Society:=

That all delegates to the Conferences shall discuss, not the problems of “disarmament,” but (1) the problem of striking the bands from the wrists of the wage-slaves; (2) the artificial arbitrary restriction placed upon the consuming power of the wage-earners, out of which fact grows the imminent world-struggle for the “world-market.”

=A Second Special Challenge to the Hague Peace Society:=

That the Society shall frankly announce in all its Conferences, in all its Reports, in all its leaflets, in all its lectures and sermons, that the Socialist Party’s method of preventing war is to frankly and loudly WARN THE VICTIMS OF WAR, the working class, just what war always means to the working class; and that this method has succeeded in preventing two wars in recent years in cases where the Hague Peace Society was powerless.

=A Third Special Challenge to the Hague Peace Society:=

That the Society shall explain why the Capitalist masters of the Hague Peace Society will not permit their vassals in the Conferences to accept the Second Challenge.

The author of WAR—WHAT FOR?, in the summer of 1910, attended a National Peace Conference in New York City. The Conference was attended by some of the most distinguished peace-wishers in the United States, including capitalists, orators and college professors. The author was given the floor to address the Convention. Everything went well until the author began to urge that all who want peace should make every possible effort to WARN THE VICTIMS of war, the working class, of what war means to the working class. Instantly there was manifest discomfort all through the audience, and very soon the chairman left his seat, came close to the speaker and urged that the speech be concluded at once. No other speaker was thus interrupted.

-----

Footnote 182:

Charles Seignobos: Political History of Europe Since 1815, p. 819.

Footnote 183:

Similar practice was common in our Civil War.

Footnote 184:

But see Index: “Four Historic Events.”

Footnote 185:

May 21, 1909. Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 186:

Report of the United States Pullman Strike Commission: Carroll D. Wright, Chairman.

Footnote 187:

See Chapter Ten on “What Shall We Do About It?”

Footnote 188:

See article by Labor Commissioner C. D. Wright: North American Review, June, 1902; also R. T. Ely: Outlines of Economics, Edition of 1908, pp. 397–98.

Footnote 189:

International Journal of Ethics, April, 1908.

Footnote 190:

C. D. Wright: Practical Sociology, p. 38.

Footnote 191:

See Report of Secretary of War, 1908, p. 155. Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 192:

An excellent edition of the law with notes, analysis, history, and suggestions by Mr. Ernest Untermann, can be had for 5 cents, of any Socialist literature agent.

Footnote 193:

London, March 21, 1908.

Footnote 194:

Miss Jane Addams: Newer Ideals of Peace, p. 232.

Footnote 195:

Civil Liberty, pp. 116–117.

Footnote 196:

G. Stanley Hall: Adolescence, Vol. I., pp. 222–23.

Footnote 197:

The Rough Riders, p. 139. Found in Edition of 1899, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons; page 152, as published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Footnote 198:

System of Ethics, p. 660.

Footnote 199:

Militarism, pp. 60–61.

Footnote 200:

William Shakespeare, Pt. 3, Bk. 3, Ch. I.

Footnote 201:

See Chapter Eight, Section 11,—of special interest to women who incline to be “perfectly delighted” with soldiers.

Footnote 202:

Quoted by Thomas E. Will, Arena, Dec., 1894.

Footnote 203:

Moral Damage of War, pp. 146–47.

Footnote 204:

Education and the Higher Life, p. 171.

Footnote 205:

Works, Vol. IV., Dresden Edition, p. 124.

Footnote 206:

“Lecture on War.”

Footnote 207:

The Destiny of Man, pp. 100–103.

Footnote 208:

Lester F. Ward: Applied Sociology, p. 264.

Footnote 209:

Bloomfield: “Farmer’s Boy.”

Footnote 210:

Pope’s Homer’s “Iliad.”

Footnote 211:

Militarism, p. 316.

Footnote 212:

Quoted by John A. Hobson: John Ruskin: Social Reformer, p. 346.

Footnote 213:

Militarism, p. 317.

Footnote 214:

See Chapter Eleven.

Footnote 215:

See Chapter Ten, also Index: “Revolution of Opinion.”

Footnote 216:

See McCabe and Darien: Can We Disarm? p. 56.

Footnote 217:

See Index: “What War Decides”; also “Blood Cost of War.”

Footnote 218:

Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, Book II., Chapter 8.

Footnote 219:

See Index: “Parasites.”

Footnote 220:

Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 221:

Report, 1907, p. 73.

Footnote 222:

See Report of Department of War, 1906.

Footnote 223:

See Annual Reports of the Secretaries of War for the years named; also Preface of the present volume.

Footnote 224:

Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 225:

See Report of the War Department, 1908, p. 21; see also Index: “Insanity.”

Footnote 226:

The World’s Work, May, 1907.

Footnote 227:

Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 228:

See Reports of the Department of War for the respective years.

Footnote 229:

Report of the Secretary of War, 1907, p. 72.

Footnote 230:

Mr. Roosevelt’s kill-for-pleasure hunting trip in Africa in 1909–10 included, according to the press reports, “a splendid time,” “a corking time,” shooting monkies—murdering his ancestral cousins, so to speak—“a careful count being kept of the exact number” of the jolly, playful little creatures butchered for the brave and noble gentleman’s amusement on his “old home” trip.

Footnote 231:

A private, writing from the Philippines, in Everybody’s Magazine, April, 1908.

Footnote 232:

Imperial Democracy, p. 272.

Footnote 233:

The Moral Damage of War, pp. 150–51.

Footnote 234:

Quoted by Professor E. A. Ross, in his Social Control, p. 89.

Footnote 235:

See Chapter Eight: “For Mother and the Boys,” Section 1.

Footnote 236:

See Index: “Bankruptcy, Danger of.”

Footnote 237:

The International, July, 1908. Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 238:

Documents of the American Association for International Conciliation, 1907–08, p. 22.

Footnote 239:

See The Peace Conference at The Hague, pp. 93–120, and 151.

Footnote 240:

Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 87. See International Conciliation—Documents of the American Association for International Conciliation, 1907–08: Third Paper—“A League of Peace.”