Lift up your meek faces, you tricked toilers of the world. The war trenches are yawning for your lives—a gulf in which the hopes, the happiness, the blood and the tears of your class will be swallowed.
Refuse.
When you understand, brothers, you will defend yourselves.
The day is dawning when the working class will not only shrewdly refuse to be tricked to the trenches, but will also proudly seize all the powers of government in defense of the working class. The working class must defend the working class. The state, the school, the press, the lecture platform, and even part of the church, all these powerful institutions, are at present used to fasten and hold the burdens of toil and the curse of war on the backs of the brutalized and despised working-class producers and the working-class destroyers.
It is our move, brothers. Have we sense enough for self-defense? See Chapter Ten: “Now What Shall We Do About It?”
CHAPTER SEVEN.
For Father and the Boys.
Following are “Topics for Discussion,” commended especially to working men as themes for conversations by fathers (and mothers) and sons, daughters also. It is hoped, too, that many of these themes may be brought up for discussion by labor union bodies.
The reader will kindly refer to the footnote on page [13].
The divisions—or “sections”—of the present chapter and of the succeeding chapter are not always materially related, and for the author’s purpose it is not necessary that they should be. The section numbering is for convenience in cross reference and for indexing.
(1) The Tsar of Russia and Germany’s famous general Von Moltke positively refused to permit the young soldiers to see Verestchagin’s pictures of war. Why? Because the pictures are true: they look like hell. Hell is not alluring.