“Neglecting the kindly and assuageable problem of rural poverty, we seem driven to the conclusion that some seven and a half millions of people are at the present moment in England living below the poverty line—a problem which if only definitely realized in its squalid immensity is surely enough to stagger humanity.”[[110]]
In England, because of the physical decline of the working class, the Government has so much difficulty in finding a sufficient number of sound men to fill the ranks that it has been necessary, since the Battle of Waterloo, to repeatedly lower the physical requirements for enlistment.
Thus do our brothers and sisters of the working class decay—driven to death—in the mills and mines and other industries. And in many parts of the world the fleshless skulls of the toilers slaughtered on the battlefield stare and grin at the present generation of workers decaying, dying in the capitalist industrial warfare. The president of Stanford University, Dr. David Starr Jordan, writes:[[111]]
“It is claimed on authority ... that the French soldier of today is nearly two inches shorter than the soldier of a century ago.... There [in Novara, Italy] the farmers have ploughed up skulls of men till they have piled up a pyramid ten to twelve feet high.... These were the skulls of the young men of Savoy, Sardinia, and Austria,—men of eighteen to thirty-five, without physical blemish so far as may be.... You know the color that we call magenta, the hue of the blood that flowed out over the olive trees.... Go over Italy as you will, there is scarcely a spot not crimsoned with the blood of France, scarcely a railway station without its pile of French skulls. You can trace them across to Egypt, to the foot of the Pyramids. You will find them in Germany, at Jena and Leipzig, at Lützen and Bautzen and Austerlitz. You will find them in Russia, at Moskow; in Belgium, at Waterloo. ‘A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man,’ said Napoleon; and with the rest are the skulls of boys ... ‘born to be food for powder,’ was the grim epigram of the day.”
This vast crime, this phase of hell for the working class, is well stated by J. H. Rose:[[112]]
“Amidst the ever deepening misery they [Napoleon’s army] struggled on, until of the 600,000 who had proudly crossed the Niemen for the conquest of Russia, only 20,000 famished, frost-bitten, unarmed spectres staggered [back] across the bridge of Lorno in the middle of December.... Despite the loss of the most splendid army ever marshalled by man, Napoleon ... strained every effort to call the youth of the empire to arms.... The mighty swirl of the Moskow campaign sucked in 150,000 lads under twenty YEARS OF AGE INTO THE VORTEX.... The peasants gave up their sons as food for cannon.... In less than half a year after the loss of half a million men a new army nearly as large was marshalled.... But the majority were young.... Soldiers were wanting, youths were dragged forth.”
President Jordan, quoting Mr. Otto Seek, said:[[113]]
“Napoleon in a series of years seized all the youth of high stature and left them scattered over many battlefields, so that the French people who followed them are mostly men of smaller stature. More than once in France since Napoleon’s time has the [physical] limit been lowered.”
The ancient Romans, a large robust people, spilt so much of the best blood of the best men in their “glorious” wars that their modern descendants, the Italians, are conspicuously inferior, physically, to their ancient ancestors; comparatively they are stunted. The “glorious” victories of Caesar alone cost more than a million picked men on the battlefield.[[114]]
These vast, incalculable wrongs thrust into the lives of the working class—will they ever be righted?