[OOW]| <632 words>
[OOW]|
<17th August 1915>
[OOW]|To the Editor of
Sir, ~~ [OOW]| I see by copies of your paper that have been sent [OOW]| me that you have been making very free with my name [OOW]| in reference to the war. I deplore this war, and [OOW]| all wars, and earnestly desire that the horrors of [OOW]| the present situation shall be, for the future, [OOW]| impossible. At the same time I feel the soldiers [OOW]| who have fallen in battle are worthy of the [OOW]| greatest respect and honour, especially from those [OOW]| who believe that Australia may be a prize of war in [OOW]| the event of a German victory.
Surely a [OOW]| pension of 1 pound a week to a soldier's widow, and [OOW]| 13 pounds for a child up to 16, is a very inadequate [OOW]| reward for the dependents of the heroes who have preserved [OOW]| us from German rule.
Your readers have been [OOW]| very active on the recruiting platform, as I know. [OOW]| Most of them deeply regret that the years have [OOW]| imposed a fleshy burden too heavy for them to carry [OOW]| up the heights of Gallipoli, and that good living [OOW]| has brought with it the penalties of shortness of [OOW]| breath and gouty toes, which impair their fitness [OOW]| as effectives. Could not these unfortunates ease [OOW]| their hearts, swollen with love of country, by [OOW]| providing for the soldiers and their families in a [OOW]| manner worthy of the services they have [OOW]| rendered?
I see the Employers' Federation [OOW]| and other business men have generously offered to [OOW]| permit the returned soldiers, who are able, to work [OOW]| for them, but believe that they must desire to do [OOW]| much more for them than that.
I suggest that [OOW]| those who are not serving at the front should make [OOW]| over their incomes to the families of the soldiers [OOW]| for 20 years following the termination of the war. [OOW]| This would enable the children of those who have [OOW]| sacrificed themselves for their country to take [OOW]| advantage of the best educational opportunities, [OOW]| and parents could then be kept in the affluence to [OOW]| which they are entitled. The wives of the rich men [OOW]| who cannot go to the front could live in Richmond [OOW]| or Colingwood, and take in washing, quite as well [OOW]| as the soldiers' widows, and they ought not to [OOW]| shrink from sending their children to the State [OOW]| Schools, which are considered quite good enough for [OOW]| other little Britons.
As to the returned [OOW]| heroes, let them go to the Universities, and [OOW]| afterwards take up the best land if they can, and, [OOW]| if not, why should they not live upon a nice, warm [OOW]| sum invested in the War Loan?
Now, sir, if [OOW]| you will start this scheme through your valuable [OOW]| journal, I offer my services free of charge to [OOW]| undertake the secretarial and organising work.
[OOW]|Yours faithfully,
When this terrible
[OOZ]| European conflict broke out, violent Imperialists
[OOZ]| were discovered to have been drawing dividends
[OOZ]| from German army and navy contracts, and to have
[OOZ]| facilitated Austrian, Turkish, and Bulgarian
[OOZ]| military and naval offence and defence. It was
[OOZ]| revealed, too that French and German business men
[OOZ]| had mutually armed the enemy against their own
[OOZ]| compatriots, and even now German-Americans, with
[OOZ]| pronounced German sympathies, are making fortunes
[OOZ]| by selling munitions to the Allies, whom they
[OOZ]| declare intend to use them for the destruction of
[OOZ]| the Fatherland. POSITION OF THE
[OOZ]| WORKERS. The workers of the world are in
[OOZ]| this extraordinary position: They create all
[OOZ]| capital, and provide the whole of humanity with
[OOZ]| the needs of war and peace. Yet they have no
[OOZ]| control whatever over the production or
[OOZ]| distribution of the world's wealth. While bread is
[OOZ]| so scarce and dear that millions of the
[OOZ]| proletarian classes are in dire want of it, the
[OOZ]| energies of Labor are misdirected to producing
[OOZ]| useless and injurious material. We have, for
[OOZ]| instance, lands suitable for wheat growing devoted
[OOZ]| to the cultivation of opium, tobacco and hops, and
[OOZ]| still other great areas of fruitful earth lying
[OOZ]| fallow, awaiting the investment of capital, which
[OOZ]| is diverted into wrong channels, in the
[OOZ]| production, let us instance, of gin, tawdry
[OOZ]| jewellery, adulterated and injurious drugs,
[OOZ]| indecent postcards and books, hideous prints,
[OOZ]| ornaments, picture palaces, adulterated food and
[OOZ]| clothing, gunpowder, and the munitions of war.
[OOZ]| Labor is locked up in these harmful, anti-social
[OOZ]| activities, and the community lives, to a certain
[OOZ]| extent, upon its own destruction. RESULTS
[OOZ]| OF THE SYSTEM. The hideous results of this
[OOZ]| system are plainly apparent. We can trace to the
[OOZ]| weakness of the masses and the ruthless cupidity
[OOZ]| of the few ages of human misery. When the English
[OOZ]| peasantry were driven from the soil, which was
[OOZ]| theirs by right, to make place for the more
[OOZ]| profitable sheep, they plunged their posterity
[OOZ]| into the conditions which have been described with
[OOZ]| much passion and eloquence by contemporary
[OOZ]| writers. This passage by Disraeli indicates
[OOZ]| something of the truth:~~
[OOZ]|
~~
THE MASTERS' [OOZ]| HARVEST.
By the lives of strong men, [OOZ]| suffering women and hapless children stores of [OOZ]| capital were at that time harvested for the [OOZ]| masters, who employed it in purchasing the control [OOZ]| of vaster and vaster holdings in the earth's raw [OOZ]| material and in the lives of human beings whose [OOZ]| capacity for labor they could exploit. The sweated [OOZ]| girls and women of Lancashire bought their masters [OOZ]| not only the ugly, pretentious mansions and [OOZ]| expensive equipages, the huge banquets and the [OOZ]| sports and the pleasures of idleness, but cotton [OOZ]| fields and slaves, cocoa and rubber plantations, [OOZ]| and rich stores of ivory, spices, oil, herds of [OOZ]| cattle, ships and railways.
In our own day [OOZ]| the half-starved girls in the Potteries, who [OOZ]| practise prostitution to eke out their wages; the [OOZ]| nail and chain makers of the Midlands, with their [OOZ]| sunken cheeks and flattened breasts, whose sickly [OOZ]| children play among the embers of their mothers' [OOZ]| forge; the pallid tailoresses and shirt makers, [OOZ]| the poor rag-pickers, sack-sewers and matchmakers, [OOZ]| the tiny child workers, carding hooks and eyes and [OOZ]| buttons, who earn their living before they are old [OOZ]| enough to go to school, all purchase for those who [OOZ]| employ them the imposing mercantile marine, the [OOZ]| railways which are intersecting the globe, the new [OOZ]| mills springing up in distant Eastern lands, where [OOZ]| the factory whistle now awakens the Japanese, [OOZ]| Chinese and Indian families, and calls mothers and [OOZ]| little children, young men and maidens to the [OOZ]| slavery of the machine.
THE WORKERS' [OOZ]| HANDIWORK.
The workers ~~ men, women and [OOZ]| children ~~ are feeding and clothing millions of [OOZ]| fighting men, and furnishing them with the poison [OOZ]| shells, the noxious gases, the bombs, bayonets and [OOZ]| hand grenades with which they are destroying [OOZ]| themselves ~~ for the greater glory of God and the [OOZ]| Empire. The guns and the ships, from the time that [OOZ]| the quick timber stood in the forests and the [OOZ]| metals lay undisturbed in the earth to the moment [OOZ]| when the last screw was fixed, are their [OOZ]| handiwork. Wives toil from morning till night to [OOZ]| enable their husbands to accomplish this work, and [OOZ]| mothers bear their children to continue it. And [OOZ]| all this they do without understanding or [OOZ]| regulating their mighty power.
CONCRETE [OOZ]| EXAMPLES.
Concrete examples are needed to [OOZ]| drive this meaning home. The Belgian people, [OOZ]| living industrious lives, have created wealth for [OOZ]| their employers, who were thus given the means to [OOZ]| secure and control rubber plantations in the Congo [OOZ]| and a vast supply of helpless and ignorant [OOZ]| laborers. Now the terrible truth can be no longer [OOZ]| hidden. The wretched slaves are being murdered, [OOZ]| mutilated and tortured. Women are compelled to [OOZ]| work on pain of seeing their children's limbs [OOZ]| struck off, their husbands' entrails ripped out, [OOZ]| or their daughters outraged and mutilated before [OOZ]| their eyes. In a few years millions of these poor [OOZ]| creatures have been wiped out. The Belgian [OOZ]| workers, by their weakness, give this power into [OOZ]| the hands of those in whose interests such deeds [OOZ]| are done.
Again, the German workers, [OOZ]| content to blindly use their industry and skill at [OOZ]| the bidding of others, have forged a dreadful [OOZ]| military machine. They made the poison gases and [OOZ]| the tremendous guns that have shattered thousands [OOZ]| of peasant homes, driving out the mothers and [OOZ]| children to die of cold and hunger; they [OOZ]| constructed the torpedoes which sent the [OOZ]| passengers on the Lusitania to their watery [OOZ]| graves, and both the Zeppelins and the bombs which [OOZ]| have slaughtered innocent non-combatants.
[OOZ]|The English workers, lovers of Democracy and [OOZ]| humanity as they profess to be, have made by their [OOZ]| own hands engines of death no less terrible, which [OOZ]| have been used for purposes as evil. It was they [OOZ]| who enabled British financiers to supply the Czar [OOZ]| with the means to drown the Russian agitation for [OOZ]| Constitutional Reform in blood; it was they who [OOZ]| enabled the Government to pursue with so much [OOZ]| cruelty, and for such base purposes, the war in [OOZ]| South Africa, and who assist in holding in the [OOZ]| grip of militarism, that servant of greed, India [OOZ]| and Egypt.
The American workers, too, pay [OOZ]| for the guns and the soldiers who mow down the [OOZ]| desperate, starving strikers, even to the little [OOZ]| girl machinists whose innate morality impels them [OOZ]| to seek a wage sufficient to live upon without [OOZ]| selling their bodies as well as their labor.
[OOZ]|The workers made the sickening carnage in [OOZ]| Europe possible, as they do the massacres of the [OOZ]| Jews, the police tortures and the famines in [OOZ]| India, the conscription and unspeakable atrocities [OOZ]| of the military machines of France and Germany, [OOZ]| the degradation of womanhood for profit's sake ~~ [OOZ]| in short, the slavery and exploitation of the [OOZ]| people all over the world.
THE WORKERS' [OOZ]| DUTY.
It surely is the duty of the workers [OOZ]| to realise that they are not mere cogs in a [OOZ]| machine, but men and women capable of reason, with [OOZ]| a moral sense implanted in them by God. In the [OOZ]| past they have been used by others for their own [OOZ]| hurt, and to inflict the cruelest suffering upon [OOZ]| their fellows. The war alone has destroyed the [OOZ]| prospect of all happiness for countless millions [OOZ]| of the human race, and for their posterity for [OOZ]| generations to come. Yet the united strength of [OOZ]| Labor could forbid wars for ever, wipe out [OOZ]| poverty, raise womanhood from degradation, purify [OOZ]| men, and flood the world with beautiful and noble [OOZ]| creations of the genius of mankind.
WHAT OF [OOZ]| THE FUTURE?
There is no prospect of any [OOZ]| improvement while conditions remain as they are. [OOZ]| The workers, blindly controlled by commercial [OOZ]| agencies, will not be permitted to grow food for [OOZ]| the millions of hungry mouths, nor to manufacture [OOZ]| clothing for rag-covered bodies, nor to build [OOZ]| houses to accommodate prosperous families, nor to [OOZ]| make pleasant and useful things for a happy and [OOZ]| intelligent humanity.
INCREASED [OOZ]| ARMAMENTS.
The price of metals is high, and [OOZ]| it will rise higher. High prices stimulate [OOZ]| production, and work is most plentiful where good [OOZ]| profits can be obtained. Therefore, men will [OOZ]| descend into the bowels of the earth for metals, [OOZ]| which other men and women will presently work up [OOZ]| into armaments. New guns, bigger and more [OOZ]| destructive than the old ones; new ships more [OOZ]| terrible than the Dreadnoughts and [OOZ]| super-Dreadnoughts of our day; aeroplanes, bullets, [OOZ]| shells, bombs, with a power incalculably stronger [OOZ]| and more deadly than those which have broken so [OOZ]| many mothers' hearts in this great war, will be [OOZ]| stored up for the next.
The poor miner will [OOZ]| do his part, and end by tearing up his lungs with [OOZ]| miners' phthisis: the mother, rushing to the small [OOZ]| arms factory, will leave her wailing, sickly [OOZ]| children to be poisoned by the purveyors of tinned [OOZ]| milk and adulterated food; the girls whose [OOZ]| sweethearts' bones are bleaching on the [OOZ]| battlefields will make the bullets to render some [OOZ]| other girls forlorn; and all the while the [OOZ]| disinherited men will be drilling ~~ waiting to [OOZ]| fall upon one another when the word to spring is [OOZ]| given.
THE INEVITABLE.
Once the [OOZ]| price of metals threatens to fall through the [OOZ]| accumulation of unused products, then the Press, [OOZ]| owned and controlled by corporations of metal [OOZ]| firms, financiers, and other speculators in blood [OOZ]| and iron, will work up war scares, start hatreds, [OOZ]| and intoxicate the people with a spurious [OOZ]| patriotism; then ambitious rulers and military [OOZ]| nabobs panting for martial glory and politicians [OOZ]| plunging for popularity and the sweets of office [OOZ]| will let loose upon us, once again, the horrors of [OOZ]| war.
Democratic institutions and Courts of [OOZ]| Arbitration will fail us in that supreme hour. If [OOZ]| we starve ourselves, degrade women and enslave [OOZ]| children to make the means of dealing death, and [OOZ]| give the power of life and death into the hands of [OOZ]| the soulless organisations of financial and [OOZ]| business men, there is no fact on earth or in [OOZ]| heaven so certain as that death will be our [OOZ]| portion.
LABOR'S IMPERATIVE DUTY.
[OOZ]|Can we doubt, then, what are the rights and [OOZ]| duties of Labor? To gain control over the wealth [OOZ]| they create, and to employ their mighty productive [OOZ]| power only for the welfare and happiness of their [OOZ]| human comrades is not only the right, but the [OOZ]| imperative duty, of working men and women.