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 pawn-broker of the class 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 bloody orgy gets dividends, honors, special privileges, and greater power as his share in this twentieth-century massacre 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.