Chapter Six, paragraph headed: “A Special Warning to the Working Class

of the United States.”)

One more word here:

Brothers, beware!

With pride and defiance hold up your heads—and think.

Prepare to say: “WE REFUSE.”

Beware. Another war is brewing.

“Another war is necessary!”—your betrayers will presently tell you.

True! From the capitalist’s point of view another war will, indeed, presently be necessary; another war becomes more and more imperatively necessary—and for a new and increasing reason.

The much plundered working people are beginning to think. Thought is revolutionary. A thought is a file, a keen saw, with which a soul may escape from the gloomy dungeon of prejudice. Thought is intellectual nitroglycerine for blasting the flinty mountains of prejudice. Thought utterly destroys mental rubbish. Thought kills what ought to die. Thinking slaves promptly become defiant and dare to do for freedom. Thought kills—kills slavery.

Thought, however, can still be prevented. Even the splendid thought of peace and freedom can still be strangled in a wild delirium called “patriotic” war. Hence every purchasable educated human thing with influence must play its prostitute part in resurrecting and perpetuating the ferocious thirst for war.

For capitalist purposes another war is necessary.

Therefore strangle brotherliness.

Therefore stifle man’s grand sweet dream of peace.

A fat living of domineering idleness for industrial pirates and their pampered pets and shameless hangers-on is not much longer possible, unless the masters as usual can set the working people clutching at one another’s throats, draining one another’s sweat and blood in a hateful spasm of international epilepsy called “patriotic” war.

Therefore drug the working people.

Therefore read again to the weary multitude the goriest pages of history, and declare to them that an act must be soaked in a brother’s blood before it is magnificent. The people must lust again for another savage storm of stupid wrath called war.

Therefore we see the war-flag of capitalism shrewdly waved before the bulging, easily inflamed eyes of the multitude: “Good fighters—war”; “young men not only willing, but anxious to fight—war”; “heroes, heroes—war”; “glory, military glory—war”; “noble, noble soldiers—war”; “ours the most improved arms in the world—war”; “greatest navy on earth—war”; “splendid victories—war”; “better militia—larger army—war”; “our national honor—war”; “we never surrender—war”; “America in the Orient—war”; “we must defend our foreign markets—war”; “see the brave boys behind the guns—war”; “send the fleets around the earth and dare the world to war”; “we are all ready for war, war, war”;—over and over this oratorical flag, this Christless vocabulary of blood-spilling cruelty, on and on, year after year—till these disgusting phrases steam in memory with the spurting blood of the long-mourned slain.

Another war is necessary.

Therefore fill the trenches with the carcasses of citizens and with fixed bayonets march on—on—on to noisy glory, on to the red madness of the brutal battlefield. This is the pagan text of literary and oratorical hirelings before a nation of Christians and peaceful Jews; this is the loveless refrain bellowed before blushing school girls; this is the Alexandrian slogan before excitable, impressible boys; this is the gore-stained banner to be gallantly flaunted on holidays before the tear-wet eyes of the sad old widows and the hobbling cripples of the Civil War; this is the race-cursing call to ninety millions of people sick of stupidly disputing with sword and cannon, longing to embrace one another in caressing fraternalism. Hideous echoes of the cruel voice of Caesar, savage whoop from the tomb of Napoleon, the assassin of France, barbarous yell from the war-cursed plains of the long, long ago—this—yes, this is the sublime height reached by the average orthodox teacher and preacher of patriotism.

And from all parts of this thinly veiled despotism of foxy, industrial tsars, _comes enthusiastic approval of all such teaching_;—approval from the profit-stuffed leeches whose pouting lips suck and tug at the veins of the toiling multitude; approval from the supercilious snobs at Palm Beach, Newport and Monte Carlo; approval from the editorial intellectual prostitutes of a subsidized press; approval from the “leading citizens” that roll contemptuously along carefully smoothed streets in rubber-tired carriages and from those who sneer through the palace car windows at the common “hired hands” who man the trains and keep the track in repair; approval from the masters who own the mills and mines and stick out their tongues in scorn at the hundreds of thousands out of work or on strike for a few cents more a day; approval from the “great business men” who search the earth for markets for goods produced by the sweating wage-slaves shrewdly kept too poor to buy what their own weary minds and their puffed and blistered hands create; and, saddest of all, approval from the millions of shame-faced wage-earners viciously seduced with ironically empty “prosperity” phrases, chloroformed with pompous military rhetoric, stupefied with the proud strut and cheap swagger of “prominent” and “cultivated” vulgarians—yes, approval also from these modest modern slaves through whose veins seems to slip the inherited taint of long, low-bowing servitude.

Another war is “necessary.”

Therefore from Mississippi to Minnesota and from Florida to Oregon there is a wide-grinning chuckle of lip-smacking satisfaction in the palaces and club-houses of America’s industrial masters when the easily deceived multitude clap their calloused palms in thoughtless approval as the bribed orator makes fierce visaged War stalk with hypnotic fascination across the stage before the plain deludable people. The people’s delight in arms is thus artfully deepened;—and thus and therefore both the walls of prejudice and the defiant fortresses of glittering steel—behind which the gorged masters of the multitude have for ages fattened and threatened in security—these fortresses of prejudice and force are with increasing diligence made stronger with every possible opportunity, made stronger by every possible means.

Another war?

Expect it and prepare for it by resolving not to go to the next war till the bankers and statesmen have been bleeding on the firing line for at least six weeks.

Yes—yes, it is true that the employers’ fortress of riot-guns is still strong, defiantly strong. No doubt the rent-interest-and-profit game, the game of gouge and grab and keep, will be played securely yet a while by the plunder-bloated masters of our great and glorious country. Undoubtedly millions of our thoughtless young working class men are still ready for plutocratic Senators and Congressmen and uncrowned cruelty in the White House to craftily yell: “Sic ’em, boys, sic ’em.”

But light breaks.

Everywhere, every day the toilers of the world listen—listen more respectfully, listen more intelligently, listen more gratefully to the glad new gospel of justice and peace.

The change comes and come it must. That cruel spell wrought over the mind of the multitude by the bribed orator, by the purchased writer, by the blood-lusting “man on horseback,” and by the far-looking masters of industry—that spell will be, must be, broken. The iron shackles on the wrists and ankles of the toilers have already been broken. The wage-slaves’ shackles also must be rended, not only the industrial, but the mental slavery of the modern workers must be destroyed.

And comes now swiftly forward that soft-toned, but all-conquering gospel of peace and freedom—freedom for the dumb, voiceless multitude, now deadened with the deafening roar of machinery, deadened with the stifling dust and withering heat of the mills, deadened with the poisonous gases in the mines, freedom for the multitude soon to be glad, happy, loving, laughing in the commonwealth of cooperation, of mutualism, of fraternalism—of Socialism.

Courage, courage. Put the strong shoulders of your twelve million ballots to the “stalled world’s wheel” and push. Strike. March. Dawn-ward toward peace.

Know this, you toil-tormented horde: That shrewd juggler’s word war—word with which the swinishly selfish masters have for ages seduced the gullible multitude into the ditches across which those same masters have then rolled on sneering, snickering and safe, that spell-working word reeking with the blood-rotting stench of centuries, that word war and all that that word war now stands for must be stricken from the language of brothers, struck from the affairs of mankind,—forgotten forever—forever replaced by the sweetening peace and the sane abiding power of warless Socialism.

Brothers of the working class, wherever you are on all the earth, let us all say, altogether:

Peace is patriotism to mankind.

_We do not want other people’s blood and we refuse to waste our own._

For thousands of years the ruling class have bled us pale. All cannon have always been aimed at us—by us.

We did not see. Our eyes were blinded with our own blood; our minds were paralyzed with lies.

But now we see. Now we understand. And therefore now we stand erect in self-respect. Now in sincere fellowship we extend the right hand of brotherhood to all the working men—and to all the women and to all the children—of the whole world; and to all these we promise:

We will not fight.

We refuse to plunge bayonets into one another’s breasts.

We refuse to slay the fathers of tender children.

We refuse to murder the brothers and lovers of women.

We refuse to butcher the husbands of devoted wives.

We refuse to “Hurrah” over victories that break the heart and blind the world with tears.

We refuse the cheap rôle of Armed Guard—as the salaried assassins in the service of the plunder-bloated coward ruling class.

If the masters want blood let them cut their own throats.

Footnote 301:

_Social Control_, pp. 376–79. Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 302:

_General Sociology_, p. 233.

Footnote 303:

_Dynamic Sociology_, Vol. I., p. 582. Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 304:

See _The Theory of the State_, Bk II., Chs. 17, 18.

Footnote 305:

_Introduction to Sociology_, pp. 132–36.

Footnote 306:

See Chapter Three, The Explanation.

Footnote 307:

“Classes differ in readiness to twist social control to their own advantage.... In general, the more distinct, knit together, and self-conscious the influential minority, the more likely is social control to be colored with class selfishness.”—Professor E. A. Ross, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, _Social Control_, p. 86.

Footnote 308:

See Chapter Eleven for suggestions on the origin of large-scale parasitic aggression; and on the origin and history of the working class and of the class-labor form of society.

Footnote 309:

See _Dynamic Sociology_, Vol. I., pp. 581–97; _Psychic Factors in Civilization_, Chapter 24.

Note carefully the quotation on methods of social parasites at the head of the present chapter from Dr. Ross’s _Social Control_. Professor Ross is generally recognized as one of the most profound and brilliant writers on Sociology.

It is important to consider, too, that, as a Socialist, Dr. Franklin H. Giddings, Head of Department of Sociology in Columbia University, recognizes the capitalist class’s parasitic relation to society. Dr. Giddings is recognized in all the universities of the world as having few equals as a sociologist.

The social parasites of the world will never forgive the learned Socialist, Dr. Thorstein Veblen, recently of the University of Chicago, for writing his bold and astonishing book, _The Theory of the Leisure Class_. The screaming mockeries and glittering pretensions of the “princely-fortune” parasites of capitalism are mercilessly explained by him.

It is noteworthy too that the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Sociology, and Head of the Department of Sociology in the University of Chicago, Dr. Albion W. Small, has for many years been calling attention, in lectures, to the parasitic nature of _one_ of the forms of capitalist income, thus: “There is no moral justification for the taking of interest incomes.” In his _General Sociology_, pp. 268–69, Dr. Small says: “In the first place, capital produces nothing. It earns nothing.” See also his suggestions on social parasites on page 266, where he is clearly in considerable degree in agreement with Dr. Ward.

Gustavus Myers’ _History of Great American Fortunes_ is here again commended as an extraordinary record of remarkable social parasitism in American history.

Footnote 310:

See _Twenty-Eight Years in Wall Street_, p. 388; by Henry Clews, a very well known banker of Wall Street.

Footnote 311:

See Chapter Three, “Explanation”—Surplus.

Footnote 312:

Andrew Carnegie is a sample of a profit-stuffed tyrant whose parasitic industrial income is tens of millions per year without rendering industrial service, whose legally parasitic heirs, rendering no industrial service, will, like leeches, suck up many millions per year. The audacity of his hypocrisy is typical of his class. In recent international peace congresses Carnegie has been steadily grinning and chattering in the spot light. But study this man for a moment:

(1) In the Homestead industrial civil war, in 1892, Pinkertons received $5 per day and expenses for murdering Carnegie steel workers.

(2) The Carnegie Company furnished the Russian Government steel armor for warships at about one-half the price the same company _patriotically_ charged Carnegie’s own dear, dear country.

(3) “Our records show that the companies governed by Mr. Carnegie received more rebates [_in anarchistic defiance of his country’s laws_] during the time when rebates were given by our road, than any other shipper in any line of business.”—First Vice-President Green of the Pennsylvania Railway Company. Quoted in the New York _Independent_.

(4) This same crafty gentleman recently provided enormous old-age pension funds for college and university professors. This will perhaps tightly seal the lips of thousands of teachers on the raging civil war in industry in which war Carnegie is already a blood-stained tzar. Fearing to lose their old age pensions, teachers may find it easier and more “respectable” to desert the working class in its struggle against the capitalist class—Carnegie’s class. (See Index: “Hague Peace Conference”; also Chapter Two, pages 24–25.)

Footnote 313:

“If, however, there occurs some general industrial disturbance of a serious sort, such as a condition of over-production, ... it is likely to turn out that these _vocational_ groupings will be weakened or even destroyed. In their place the _economic classes_ will enter the _political_ arena, and carry on the conflict with great energy.... It may be that the standard of life of an industrial class may be so seriously threatened that this class struggle will reach the extreme of absolute hostility.”—Professor Albion W. Small, Head of Department of Sociology, University of Chicago: _General Sociology_, p. 264. Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 314:

Reread first page of Preface.

Footnote 315:

William E. Gladstone.

Footnote 316:

“... Non-resistance would be fatal.... If ever war is done away, it will be when the spirit of aggression, not of protection, shall have been quenched.”—Lester F. Ward: _Dynamic Sociology_, Vol. I., p. 684.

Footnote 317:

See Chapter Seven, Section 12.

Footnote 318:

William Howard Taft: _Present-Day Problems_, pp. 162–63:—

“... It is also true that had the Elkins bill never been passed, the same acts could and doubtless would have been prosecuted ... under the Interstate Commerce Act of 1889 which the Elkins law supplanted.... Under the 1889 amendment, however, the individuals convicted could have been sent to the penitentiary, whereas under the Elkins Act the punishment by imprisonment was taken away.... The chief effect of the Elkins law had on these particular prosecutions ... was ... to save the guilty individual perpetrators from imprisonment.

“It was well understood that the Elkins bill was passed without opposition by, and with the full consent of, the railroads, and the chief reason was the elimination of the penitentiary penalty for unjust discriminations.... The imprisonment of two or three prominent officers of a railway company, or a trust ... would have greater deterrent effect for the future than millions in a fine.”

Theodore Roosevelt knows a good deal about the capitalist class. He wrote on pages 5, 6, 9, 10 of his book, _American Ideals_, as follows:

“The people that do harm in the end are not the wrong-doer whom _all_ execrate.... The career of Benedict Arnold has done us no harm as a nation.... The foes of order harm quite as much by example as by what they actually accomplish. So it is with the _equally dangerous criminals of the wealthy classes_. The conscienceless stock speculator who acquires wealth by swindling his fellows, by debauching judges, and corrupting legislatures, and who ends his days with the reputation of being among the richest men in America, exerts over the minds of the rising generation an influence _worse than that of the average murderer or bandit_, because his career is even more dazzling in its success, and even more dangerous in its effects upon the community. Any one who reads the essays of Charles Francis Adams and Henry Adams, entitled _A Chapter of Erie_, and the _Gold Conspiracy in New York_, will read about the doings of men whose influence for evil upon the community is more potent than that of any band of anarchists or train robbers.... Too much cannot be said against men who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune ... whether ... to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. _Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church_ which makes those good people, who are also foolish, forget his real iniquity.” Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 319:

Theodore Roosevelt: in a speech at the State Fair, Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 3, 1901.

Footnote 320:

“If the public economy of a people be an organism, we must expect to find that the perturbations, which affect it, present some analogies to the diseases of the body physical. We may, therefore, hope to learn much that may be of use in practice, from the tried methods of medicine.” Roscher: _Political Economy_, Vol. I., pp. 85–86.

Footnote 321:

It must be added for the sake of clearness (and fairness):

(1) That _some_ members of the capitalist class detest the capitalist system; that these regret their unsocial relation to the social body; and that while they are living under the capitalist system they are in somewhat the same difficulty that a democrat is in Russia. One can _believe_ in democracy in Russia, but he can not _practice_ democracy under the autocratic form of Russian government. So under Capitalism: one may believe in industrial democracy, but he cannot practice it under an industrial despotism.

(2) That some members of present society belong partly to the capitalist class and partly to the working class.

(_The Theory of the Leisure Class_, a brilliant book by Dr. Thorstein Veblen, helpful in understanding social parasites, is urged upon the reader’s attention. Also W. J. Ghent’s _Mass and Class_.)

Footnote 322:

“The government which has the right to do an act and has imposed upon it the duty of performing the act, must, according to the dictates of reason, be permitted to select the means.”—Supreme Court of the United States, March 7, 1819. See Supreme Court Reports, Vol. 17, pp. 409, 430.

Footnote 323:

_Political Science and Constitutional Law_, Vol. I., p. 87.

Footnote 324:

_Sociology_, pp. 45, 47.

Footnote 325:

“It is the peculiarity of the social struggle that it must be conducted by a collective whole ... EVERY SOCIETY [OR CLASS] MUST SECURE SOME SUITABLE ORGAN FOR CONDUCTING THE SOCIAL STRUGGLE.

“Thus the ruling classes, through their parliaments, exercise the legislative power and are able, by legal institutions, to further their interests at the cost of others.... Thus the rulers themselves forge the weapons with which the ruled and powerless classes successfully attack them and complete the natural process.”—Gumplowitz: _Outlines of Sociology_, pp. 145–146. Italics mine. G. R. K.

Footnote 326:

_The Communist Manifesto._

Footnote 327:

Reread Chapter Seven, Section 4.

Footnote 328:

Fearing that the powerful suggestion might reach and rouse the slumbering working class the _capitalist_ press of the world kept silent as an oyster on the behavior of the clear-visioned soldiers of Norway and Sweden. Only the _working_-class press properly reported the sublime event. (See Challenge, page 206 et seq.)

Footnote 329:

For an excellent and convenient discussion of the Socialist Party’s opposition to war and militarism, see Werner Sombart’s _Socialism and the Socialist Movement_, pp. 193–211; Morris Hillquit’s _Socialism in Theory and Practice_, pp. 296–302.

Footnote 330:

“It is no easy task to detect and follow the tiny paths of progress which the unencumbered proletarian with nothing but his life and capacity for labor is pointing out for us. These paths lead to a type of government founded upon peace and fellowship as contrasted with restraint and defence.... From the nature of the case, he who would walk these paths must walk with the poor and oppressed, and can only approach them through affection and understanding. The ideals of militarism would forever shut him out from this new fellowship.”—Miss Jane Addams, of Hull House, Chicago: _Newer Ideals of Peace_, p. 30.

Footnote 331:

The class who despise you so thoroughly that they would be willing to have you murdered on the battlefield—_would these hesitate to tell you a lie?_ Certainly not. And they have lied to you about “different kinds of Socialism,” “Socialists don’t seem to know what they want,” etc., etc. But secretly the capitalists are worrying because they know that the Socialists of all the world _do_ know what they want and also know how to organize the necessary power to get what they want.