SECTION I: THE COST IN BLOOD.
“Ez fer war—I call it murder.”—James Russell Lowell.[[25]]
“The hero is a species of assassin.”—Victor Hugo.[[26]]
Human blood, human life, under the present industrial form of society, is so cheap that even a sweet child’s life, as a wage-earner, in the factory, can be bought for a few cents a day—almost a drug on the market, the “labor market.” So cheap indeed is the life of the wage-working class that the blood cost of war is regarded as comparatively unimportant—considered unimportant by all except those who are sneeringly referred to as “sentimental people.” These “sentimental people” presume to assert that the superiority of a nation’s civilization is more convincingly indicated by its sacred regard for the purity and dignity of human blood than by its cheap and swaggering boasts about big battleships, “blooded” cattle, “blooded” horses, and “young men not only willing but anxious to fight,”[[27]] or by the nation’s strutting announcement of our “readiness” to spill the toilers’ blood at the factory door and on the battlefield.
Cheaply spilt human blood surely indicates a civilization fundamentally coarse and cheap.
Until human blood, human life, becomes too sacred to be sold for cash to escape starvation or bought for cash to win a profit on the bartered labor power—too sacred to be thus placed on sale, exchanged in the “labor market” as horses and sheep are bought and sold in the “live-stock market,”—until then it will simply be impossible to realize the hideousness of the blood cost of war, impossible to compute and realize the vastness of the red crime committed against the working class,—against
“The poor souls for whom this hungry war opens its vast jaws.”
The blood cost of war?
War spills the blood of slain soldiers.
War spills the blood of non-combatants.
War weakens the blood of soldiers who are smitten with befouling fevers and whose wounds and sores fester unattended on the battlefield or are ill-attended in rude military hospitals. Disease, in war, strikes with death four times as many soldiers as are killed with lead and steel.[[28]]
War weakens the national blood by selecting the strong-blooded for slaughter, thus reversing nature’s method of selecting the weaker blooded for destruction.
War tends to open opportunity in the struggle for existence for the relatively weaker blooded to multiply in disproportionate degree.
War, it is estimated,[[29]] prevents, on the average, the birth of one child per soldier slaughtered on the battlefield, or serving three years or more in peace or war.
War weakens the blood of the nation by worse than wasting enormous supplies of food material and thus underfeeding those who toil.
War weakens the national blood by tainting the blood of great numbers of soldiers and through these tainting the blood of women and children—with venereal diseases contracted in unusual degree near the barracks and during war, and immediately following war. President William H. Taft, as Secretary of War, has said:[[30]]
“Venereal diseases were again by far the most important diseases affecting the efficiency of the Army during the year. There were constantly on sick report for this class of affections 739 men, equal to the loss for the entire year of the service of about eleven full companies of infantry.... As a cause for discharge venereal diseases were second.”
Still more recently the Secretary of War, Mr. J. M. Dickinson, reports thus on the befouling of the blood of soldiers:[[31]]
“The diseases causing the greatest non-effective rate are in the order of importance: venereal diseases, tuberculosis, malaria, rheumatism, tonsilitis, dysentery, diarrhea, bronchitis, measles, typhoid fever.
“Venereal diseases cause a greater sick rate than all the others added together.”
One of the best known publicists in the world, Mr. William T. Stead, puts the matter thus:
“Four out of five of all English soldiers who serve two years or more are tainted with venereal diseases.”[[32]]
In the present chapter, devoted to the cost of war in blood and in cash, there is for the “blood cost” space for but little more than some statistics sufficient to indicate, for illustrative purposes, the amount of blood actually spilt in war during the last three generations. The authority for the statistical matter following is, chiefly, Chatterton-Hill’s Heredity and Selection in Sociology; G. de Lapouge’s Les Selections Sociales; and J. Bloch’s The Future of War.[[33]]
The hot, red flood gushing from the torn veins of the working class, seduced or forced to attend “Death’s feast” to slaughter and be slaughtered in little more than one brief hundred recent years, may be measured thus:
In the French Wars of the Revolution, 1789–1795—
| Frenchmen | 1,800,000 |
| Other Europeans | 2,500,000 |
Wars of the Empire, 1795–1815—
| Frenchmen | 2,600,000 |
| Other Europeans | 3,500,000 |
In European and American wars since 1815—
| According to Lapouge’s estimate | 9,450,000 |
| Grand (Extremely Grand) Total | 19,850,000[[34]] |
This total does not show the spilt blood of perhaps one hundred million men wounded, in battle, but not killed.
It is specially important to consider also that this enormous total of twenty million—in round numbers—does not include many millions of non-combatants who in one way and another were destroyed during the wars and in consequence of the wars, nor the immense number of non-combatants wounded but not destroyed nor the vast amount of blood befouled and weakened with disease.
The number of men destroyed as combatants in the Franco-German War was 215,000. Lapouge estimates that for the brief Franco-German War the number of deaths among the non-combatants above the number that would have died at the normal death rate within the period consumed by the war if there had been peace, was 450,000. That is to say, during that short war of 1870–71 the number of non-combatants whose death was due to the war was more than double the number destroyed directly in the war. Now if this extra death-harvest rate among the non-combatants be calculated as being somewhat less than half true for all the wars of the civilized world for about one hundred years following 1789, we can safely add to the twenty millions slaughtered on the battlefield and in the military hospitals—to these, I say, we can add twenty millions more, who, like the four hundred and fifty thousand non-combatants in 1870–71, were smitten with the death-breath of war.
WORN-OUT BOXING GLOVES OF THE RULING CLASS
This gives us a “grand” total of forty millions (40,000,000) men, women, and children actually slaughtered or otherwise destroyed as a result of one hundred years of “splendid” and “glorious” and, “grand” and “Christianized” war;—and (blessed be the “mysterious will of God who reigns” but doesn’t rule under capitalism) these forty million lives were mostly WORKING CLASS LIVES.
Forty million lives in one brief century slashed down by Mars, the “glorious” god of battles.
One Christian century—a festival of fiends, a loud ha, ha from Hell.
One Christian century—a gash in the breast of the working class.
One Christian century—Mars and Caesar spitting in the face of the nobly peaceful Christ.
One Christian century—a sea of blood.
One Christian century—an ocean of tears.
One Christian century—the butchering of brothers by brothers.
One Christian century—a groan, a sigh, a sob.
Mars, god of war, devourer of men, scourge of women and curse of little children; Mars, “strife and slaughter ... the condition of his existence,” rushing in “without question as to which side is right, ... on his head the gleaming helmet and floating plume”; Mars, “well-favored, stately, swift, unwearied, puissant, gigantic ... foe of wisdom and scourge of mortals”; Mars whose “emblems are the spear and the burning torch, his chosen animals the vulture and the dog”;[[35]] Mars, butcher of mankind; Mars fiendishly drunk on the tears of women and children; Mars, the mock of mothers,—this race-cursing god, hour after hour, day and night, through a whole hundred recent years, has devoured one human being, has drunk more than two gallons of human blood—every twenty minutes.
A torrent of blood has gushed from the deep, damned war-wound in the breast of the working class. And in this the morning of the twentieth Christian century we hear the mouthings of hypocrisy, but we see the strut and dare of crowned and flattered brutes and buccaneers everywhere.
THE HISTORY OF IGNORANCE OBEYING ORDERS
“Base distrust, the red-eyed hound of hate,
Rules in a world by phantom foes alarmed.”
Everywhere we see the crowned and consecrated cut-throats preparing for war. Soon again the booming roar of “gun thunder” will terrify the world. Even now in Turkey, in Russia, in Spain and in Africa the blood of humble working class brothers is being splashed in the face of mankind.
Rouse, brothers, rouse!
Refuse! Refuse to paint this sad world red with the blood of the toilers fooled by the mocking flattery of gilded cowards.
Let us force Senators, Congressmen, and Presidents—let us force Tsars, Emperors, Kings, Lords, Dukes and the Industrial Masters also—let us force every one of these shrewd, proud cowards into the bloody mire of the firing line and compel them to stay there till by spilling their own blood they learn what war is—for the working class.
The capture of the powers of government by the working class for the working class—that is our first move.
The working class must defend the working class.