Part 4 (1/2)

Now they are voting war loans and fighting in the armies.

The labor organizations have long proclaimed their opposition to war.

The war is on, and they are apparently giving little attention to it.

Again and again it has been declared that kings make wars and the people fight them.

That is all very true, in the past and in the present, but once more the people are doing the fighting.

We have been told that the workingmen of the world have power to stop war.

No doubt they have, if they would use it, but they will not do so.

While this greatest of all the world's wars was brewing, the workingmen were busy manufacturing the machinery of destruction.

And they are still doing it.

And they will keep on doing it, as long as wages are to be earned that way.

Every piece of shrapnel that crashes into a human brain, or tears a human heart, or mangles a human hand on a battlefield has been laboriously and patiently made by some other human hand working for wages in some factory.

Some manufacturer has thereby made a profit.

And the money to pay that profit was loaned to some Christian nation for its war chest by some sanctimonious p.a.w.n-broker of the cla.s.s described in ”Unseen Empire” by David Starr Jordan.

It is civilized warfare, among civilized nations, in this age of civilization, sustained by civilized legislative representatives of civilized people, conducted by civilized soldiers, equipped for human destruction by civilized business men who furnish machinery of war that is manufactured by civilized workingmen.

And the workingman makes wages, the business man earns his good dividends, the banker gets his snug profit, and the man at the top, ”the man on horseback,” who started the b.l.o.o.d.y orgy gets dividends, honors, special privileges, and greater power as his share in this twentieth-century ma.s.sacre of humanity by the so-called humane methods of modern civilized warfare.

_It is the hypocrisy of it all that makes it so revolting._

And if it were not that so many _are_ making wages or salaries or profits or dividends out of the whole organized scheme of modern warfare, it would be much easier to put an end to it. That is the vital point where the women of the world should strike first if they are to end war.

It is the private profit made from war by a few that makes it so hard to stop the ruin by war of the many.

The awful waste of war has been made clear, and yet the most monstrously wasteful war of history is now being fought.

It has been urged that the huge debts owing for old wars made new wars impossible, but stupendous new war loans are now being made.

The people of Europe were said to have reached the limit of endurance of war burdens, but they are bending their backs for a heavier load.

America has expressed deep sympathy in the past for the war-ridden and burden-bearing nations of Europe, overlooking apparently, at least in recent years, some important facts.

Germany makes no hypocritical pretenses to being a nation of peace. She is avowedly a nation of warriors and believes in war.

But she gets something for what she spends besides soldiers and battles.h.i.+ps.

While she has been perfecting the most stupendous and perfectly organized war machine that has ever existed in the world, she has perfected just as gigantic and splendidly effective machinery for conducting the affairs of peace.