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| These are in very truth the days that try men's
| souls. Here is twentieth century
| civilisation, - the apex of all
| progress, with machinery, knowledge, culture and
| achievement unparalleled in all the years of man's
| existence - and its supreme fact is the
| magnitude of its sorrow and the poignancy of its
| despair. All the great patriotic newspapers
| - in all the countries-
| the eminent politicians, and the eloquent heroes of
| political battlefields extol the sword and despise
| the plough. Instead of seeking to make the earth
| fruitful of golden grain, they would have it a vast
| theatre of death. For them the child's sob in the
| darkness is the signal of glorious victory, and the
| widow's prayer in the long vigils of the silent watch
| but a song which echoes in their hearts as angels'
| music. Everywhere death reigns triumphant and the
| delirium of killing has taken the place of ordered
| sanity and human concord.
| It is time we gave it thought. Who are these
| monarchs, ministers and wretches, that they thus
| sport with the lives and fortunes of the people? Is
| it they who gave breath to man, that they thus dare
| take it from him? Did they give growth to the plants
| of the earth, that they may trample them beneath
| their iron heels? Have they toiled and spun,
| - worked and striven, -
| in the noon-day heat, the winter's cold, the pitiless storm,
| and the parched wind, that they thus blot out in an
| hour the works of centuries? Who are these brigands
| of Europe, now devouring the multitudes? Who are
| they who wantonly strut forth and order civilisation
| to die on the fields of bloody struggle because they
| so ordain it?
| War is hell! Nothing can redeem or extenuate its
| frightful villainy. For war means misery without end
| for the great mass in every land, and means
| power - riches and domination
| —-/mdash> for the few who order and profit by it.
| For centuries a comparative handful of men in each
| generation have determined how the rest shall live.
| Each nation has had, and still has, its little group
| of rulers. These rulers are ever engaged warring
| with each other. Betimes they are manufacturers in
| search of markets; anon they are Alexanders,
| Hannibals, Napoleons, and Kaisers, seeking universal
| sovereignty; again, they are ironmasters, financial
| kings, traders and the what-nots of our capitalist
| society. In all times and guises the armies and
| navies of the world have been the means with which
| they fought their way to what their biographers
| describe as victory. The tide of battle
| - howsoever it ebbed and flowed
| - always gave them a chance of triumph;
| to the multitudes over whom they were in authority it
| offered but the certainty of frightful loss.
| And to-day in every land disaster dire and
| dreadful has spread itself like a decimating
| pestilence. Not only is there agony in the trenches
| and upon the quarter-decks of the great fleets, but
| there is travail, gaunt and terrible, in every slum,
| on every pavement in the troubled cities amid the
| teeming life of every far-off State and wherever the
| foot of man treads the universe. Bread is dear, meat
| is scarce, and the pressure of the struggle for
| subsistence grows in intensity. In the shadows of
| the great war looms the grisly spectre of famine.
| Soon its icy grip will fasten itself round the hearts
| of the poor and in the market places of the earth the
| souls of men and women will, ere long, be offering as
| of old their frightful bargains.
| This is the pass to which three years of
| international fratricide has brought humanity. The
| enormous economic exactions of the war
| - the terrible depletion of the armies of
| production in all countries- could not
| but ultimately involve so seriously a diminution in
| the world-harvests as to leave them unequal to the
| subsistence necessities of mankind. And throughout
| the whole of Europe there is now feverish
| organisation with a view to grappling with the
| problem of hunger. But it is organisation directed
| by the forces responsible for the menace. It will
| suit their needs and not the needs of the world.
| Throughout all the wars of history famine followed in
| the footsteps of the great armies. It was as close
| to the hosts of conquerors as they came from the
| fields of triumph, as it was rapid in flying with the
| stricken legions of the vanquished. War produced
| famine in the years that have gone as certainly as
| though it had it in its marrow. And now, once again,
| there rises above the noise of the battle-clash the
| piercing shriek of starvation. The war is not only
| pushing back the frontiers it is besieging the
| impoverished homes of the race.
| It can now be said the giant furnace of battle has
| consumed the social life of the poor. Each day it
| has been waged has witnessed an augmentation of the
| authority of the few and an unmistakable waning-away
| of the freedom of the mass. If ever there was a time
| when the government of the earth was vested in a
| numerically insignificant group that time is now. It
| matters not what form the rulership of a country may
| assume, in its essence it is a complete negation of
| democracy. That is why the declarations of peace,
| the determination of the manner in which armies shall
| be mobilised, the principles for which they shall do
| battle, the venue where they shall be plunged into
| the bloody strife, are all issues which the peoples
| of the earth are helpless and voiceless in
| deciding.
| In addition to the resuscitation of despotic rule,
| the civil life of the nations has been given over to
| the piratical depredations of organised theft. Vast
| as is the demand of the war for munitions and
| requirements - and tremendous though be
| its depletions of the economic substance of the
| earth - it would still be possible for
| the civil populations, outside the main spheres of
| military combat, to make good the greater part of the
| food deficiency. But the Governments have given
| industry over as a free gift to the enemies of
| society. Upon the fields of war men are being killed
| by hundreds of thousands, and far away from the
| scenes of carnage, the peaceful pursuits of industry
| are despoiled by the twin-devils of interest and
| profit. The rulers of the earth who could not avert
| the terrible calamity of blood give another
| demonstration of their social menace to the people by
| permitting the mines, fields, and workshops minister
| to the predatory interests of privilege, instead of
| being devoted to the needs of the famine-pinched
| peoples of the earth. Their capacity to meet the
| requirements of the age is reduced to worse than
| nothing because of the class-domination for which
| they stand.
| Therefore in war and peace their continued
| existence is fraught with potential and active
| danger. The war happened because it was in the power
| of a few men to make war. Thus in all places the
| obligation is more democracy and less absolutism;
| more control - political, social, and
| economic - by the wage-worker, and no
| control whatever by those whom the sequel of war
| could advantage.
| When war becomes unprofitable it will pass from
| the earth. And it can never be other than a source
| of gain to some, while the industrial life of the
| world is conditioned by the exploiting decrees of
| capitalism. Hence it follows that the twin-destroyers
| of war and hunger can only disappear from
| a civilisation they have well-night eclipsed, by the
| gathering together in a definitely bonded fraternity
| of those who in all countries to-day, suffer
| oppression and social injustice.
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