Listen to the confession of the editor of a very powerful capitalist newspaper:
“It is significant that the Socialists of different races, and speaking different tongues, strangers in blood and customs, in Germany, France, Great Britain, Austria, and Italy, constitute the one great peace party of the world.”[[299]]
Listen again—to the best-known and the best loved Christian woman in the United States, Miss Jane Addams, of Hull House, Chicago:[[300]]
“The Socialists are making almost the sole attempt to preach a morality sufficiently all-embracing and international to keep pace with even the material internationalism which has standardized [even] the threads of screws and the size of bolts, so that machines become interchangeable from one country to another.... Existing commerce has long ago reached its international stage, but it has been the result of business aggression and constantly appeals for military defense and for the forcing of new markets.”
You, you who are to be tricked and shot at the factory door and on the battlefield, go to your public library and get Christianity and the Social Order, and read there the words of a preacher great enough for the City Temple of London, great enough to be the worthy successor of the world-known Joseph Parker, read the Reverend Dr. R. J. Campbell’s splendid tribute to the Socialist Party as the only political party in the world today scorning the belittling jealousies of capitalist statesmen and working effectively for international brotherhood.
Reader, you working class reader, a special word here:
Perhaps your working class neighbor’s son is at this moment falling into a patriotic trance, gullibly planning to join the local militia or the standing army or the navy, meditating on butcheries. Go to him. With a firm grasp on his mind (if he has one) wake him, rouse him, from that race-cursing dream, rouse him from the spell that for thousands of years has damned his class. Be kind. Be patient. But—wake him. Wake him for the world movement for the working class. Wake him for the war—the war without a sword, the war without a cannon; the war with a printing press, the war with a book. Teach him that salvation is through information. Teach him that the “truth will make him free.” In his brain kindle a fire, a divine unrest, a desire that can not die, the desire for peace born of justice.
Otherwise, beware lest your neighbor’s son be wheedled at any moment into the militia or the standing army or the navy—ready to be consecrated, sanctified, blessed,—for wholesale assassination, ready as a militiaman, as a Cossack, as a soldier, to stain his consecrated sword with the blood of his neighbors and brutally—patriotically—laugh at the tears of women and children.
Read to your neighbor the next Chapter: “Now, What Shall We Do About It?”