| <headline><p> <The One Way to Peace. Convene the Labor> 
| <International.> </p></headline>
| <p> It is time the International of Labor met and 
| considered the problem of peace as it presents itself to 
| the working-class mind.  For nearly four years of 
| appalling blackness the gigantic armies of the 
| belligerents have been in violent collision.  There have 
| been offensives, big and little, retirements and 
| advances, naval raids and all the terrible frenzy of red 
| war.  And it cannot be shown that the objectives of 
| either of the belligerent coalitions are nearer to 
| attainment now than when the onset commenced.  Each day 
| the sun sinks down on the growing multitude of the dead.  
| Outside the unending contribution to the gaping mouth of 
| the war glutton there is nothing to show for the 
| tremendous conflict. </p>
| <p> Are we to understand that this struggle with all its 
| agony and devastation has to go on to further agony and 
| wider and worse devastation?  What is it that stands in 
| the road of peace?  If it is true that the German 
| military caste are alone responsible for the war, and 
| that it is their lust for world-dominion that keeps 
| civilisation in the furnace, what are we doing to 
| deprive the German military caste of the means to 
| war <mdash>-</mdash> that is the support in Germany which 
| makes its army, equips its cohorts, and performs the 
| tasks without which the German Junkers could not for a 
| day maintain their existence as a world evil?  Is there 
| no method outside the ghastly outpourings of recruits to 
| the battlefronts that the Governments can devise to stop 
| the whole frightful business?  That they are unable to 
| suggest a means is no reason why the question should be 
| thrust aside.  Upon each and every human on the earth is 
| devolving a moral obligation to seek for and generously 
| consider any proposals <mdash>-</mdash> irrespective from 
| whence they originate <mdash>-</mdash> which may have the 
| effect of substituting negotiation for armed 
| ferocity. </p>
| <p> And it is obvious that the only possible basis upon 
| which the war can end quickly is that with which the 
| name of Woodrow Wilson is associated.  He more clearly 
| than any other Allied statesman, has grasped the 
| essential of the international situation <mdash>-</mdash> 
| which is, that the German Imperialists can be crippled 
| and rendered impotent, and ought to be crippled and 
| rendered impotent, by diplomatic rather than by military 
| means <mdash>-</mdash> by reason rather than by blood.  
| The way that this can be done is not far to seek.  It 
| consists exclusively in the formulation and declaration 
| of terms of peace so essentially democratic and in such 
| accord with the idealism of peace-loving peoples, as 
| would at once and for good make it impossible for the 
| German  war lords to continue the war for imperialist or 
| annexationist aims, because the suffering German people 
| would simply refuse to carry on the war for those aims 
| if they saw that an honorable peace was within their 
| grasp. </p>
| <p> For quite a long period of the war it has to be 
| confessed the speeches of Lloyd-George and W M Hughes 
| frustrated the efforts of the American President to 
| secure within Germany an acceptance of our bona-fides in 
| this connection.  While he would say:~~ <q> 
| </q>  Mr Lloyd-George would announce <q> 
| </q> and Mr Hughes would declare <q> 
| </q></p>
| <p> To what extent such bellicose statements respecting 
| the kind of peace the Allies will deem satisfactory has 
| actually delayed the securing of satisfactory peace 
| terms will never be known. It must be clear that any 
| proposals involving territorial readjustments serve as 
| powerful stimulants to the German war junkers.  They not 
| only destroy the ground beneath the feet of they who, in 
| Germany, oppose the idea of Mittel-Europa and work for 
| the kind of peace which would be a real peace, but 
| accomplish nothing beyond the consolidation of those 
| enemy forces which are the chief evil obstacles to be 
| overcome.  Take, for example the declarations that 
| Italian claims in the regions of Dalmatia and Adelia are 
| to be counted as part of the "making the world safe for 
| democracy" policy; that the Allies will continue in the 
| war until Posen and Galicia are attached to Poland and 
| Turkey has been dismembered!  In what way can these 
| purely frontier-extension projects be reconciled with 
| what we know to be the real soul of a democratic 
| peace? </p>
| <p> Mr Lloyd-George, be it well noted, has never 
| committed himself to the League of Nations, or to 
| economic peace after the war and the repudiation of the 
| Paris Conference Resolutions.  Why? Only this week we 
| have another instalment of the trade-haggling which 
| seems to occupy as much attention as does the war 
| itself.  So long as these clutchings after territorial 
| changes continue <mdash>-</mdash> for ourselves or for 
| others <mdash>-</mdash> and the trafficking for 
| commercial alliances and so forth looms conspicuously in 
| the forefront of the Allied war aims, it is idle for us 
| to look for Australian or German uprisings; there is no 
| conceivable Government of either Australia or 
| Germany <mdash>-</mdash> and this includes a 
| working-class Government, if such were possible 
| <mdash>-</mdash> 
| that would make peace until the idea of economic war 
| after the war is once and for all repudiated.  It is 
| quite idle, and worse than idle, to talk about 
| "moderate" demands, or to expect "restitution and 
| guarantees" while the Paris Conference Resolutions 
| stand.  Meanwhile the slaughter goes on. The horrors of 
| conscription, the heart-breaking desolation and 
| humiliation of war and of military discipline continue; 
| blood flows, hearts are broken, men go mad; squalor, 
| hatred, and vice prevail.  To what end? </p>
| <p> If we sincerely insist that the old order of things 
| which begot the war is to be banished from the earth, 
| then not only must militarism in the sense the Germans 
| know it pass away, but there has to be as a co-equal 
| part of the revolutionary process an entire sweeping out 
| of trade greed, miserable dollar-hunting competition, 
| and industrial profit-thugging, at home or abroad.  And 
| the best guarantee that these things are honestly sought 
| for is that we should strip from the terms of peace 
| anything and everything that has to do with mammonism in 
| the way of land-grabbing or market-rigging.  It is here 
| where the International of Labor can interpose in the 
| war situation and, in open conference before the 
| stricken world, formulate a basis of peace, which, 
| because it will speak for the peoples who suffered 
| poverty and wrong before the war, and worse poverty and 
| greater wrong during the war, will be a charter for 
| civilisation in the real sense, and not merely a 
| temporary armistice between rival groups of ambitious 
| rulers. </p>
| <p> And this is the only alternative to such further 
| smashing and killings of men that the soul sickens at 
| the prospect.  A democratic peace postulates a peace 
| made by men and women who believe in democracy and are 
| steeped body and spirit in its faith.  
| Oligarchies <mdash>-</mdash> wherever they are 
| <mdash>-</mdash> cannot end the war except by the sheer 
| obliteration of the armies of one or the other.  It is 
| from the oligarchies that the cry comes <q>  
| </q>  Hindenburg shouts it to the 
| famished citizens of Berlin and the men of Hindenburg's 
| mind shout it in London and New York.  The diplomatic 
| machine, which is the Government's alternative to armed 
| authority, is so clogged with old traditions and modern 
| deceit that it stands hopelessly in the maelstrom of 
| horror on horror. Organised Labor must make another 
| effort.  Stockholm was not and must not be the end.  All 
| the Governments are committed to war and further war.  
| All of them have bargains to drive at the point of the 
| sword.  But the sword means annexations, exploitations, 
| trade wars <mdash>-</mdash> more militarism, worse 
| misery, and greater disaster in the new world than that 
| which so signally disgraced the old. </p> 
| <trailer><p> <May 17, 1918> <The Westralian Worker> 
| <Friday, May 17, 1918> </p></trailer>