“I know,” replied Hal. “I know what you people preach; I know what your paper advocates. I read it. I’m interested in this social problem. I think you’re right in a good many things, but I can’t follow you to the end. I’m with everybody who doesn’t have a fair chance. But I don’t see the justice in knocking down a man who has a little more than I have and taking it away from him, provided he got it honestly.”
“Exactly! If he got it honestly then would he have no more than his fellow-man. Exactly! It is the ruling class who take the workers by the throat and choke them, so, into submission, into labor, poverty, bondage. What is the law? They make the law for us to obey. Do we ask for our own? Behold the jail! Do we try to take what belongs to us? Come the hired assassins, police, constabulary, militia, federal troops. So! It is terrible! Yet, some day, some day the workers will come into their own!”
They had stopped on the bridge and stood leaning against the guard-rail, looking out through the twilight across the shadowed surface of the river to the hills that towered precipitately from the farther bank. As they stood there Ben Barriscale passed them by on his way to the armory. Attracted by the eagerness in Donatello’s voice, he slackened his pace for a moment to look and listen. But the speakers, absorbed in their conversation, did not notice him.
“Why,” replied Hal, “I know there’s a good deal of injustice. But without the courts and the military there’d be more. We’ve got to have a government, and laws, and we’ve got to keep order. That’s what the militia is for. I belong to the National Guard, now, myself.”
“So? You are, then, a soldier?”
“Yes. I’ve got a state and a country. I’ve sworn allegiance to the United States, and to the State of Pennsylvania, and that I will serve them against all their enemies.”
“So, then, who are their enemies?” asked Donatello, and answered his own question: “all who exploit labor and oppress the poor.”
“Yes,” agreed Hal, “that’s true, perhaps. But there may be more direct enemies. Mobs at home, governments abroad that would want to fight us. We must protect our own. We must be patriotic.”
Donatello caught up the word:
“Patriotic! What then is patriotism? A fetish! Nothing more. A superstition fostered by capitalism for its own most selfish purposes. Oh, in that day, under the rule of the proletariat, patriotism will not be any more. Workers the world over will unite under one flag, the red flag of the common brotherhood. Not any longer will be nationalism, but internationalism. Not any longer will be wars, poverty, suffering; but peace, always peace, plenty, happiness!”