At Halle, 1890, Liebknecht said: "These ideas are indisputably correct. Nobody,[[64]] no matter how enthusiastic he may be for the international cause, will dare to maintain that we have no national duties. National and international are not opposing principles. The word 'national' must be rightly understood. It includes only a certain, limited portion of international humanity. The part belongs to the whole, and international merely means going beyond the boundary-posts of the nation, the narrower limits of the native land; to extend one's horizon to include the whole; to consider humanity as one family and the world as a home."
[!-- Note Anchor 64 --][Footnote 64: Liebknecht was wrong. There are dupes who hold that their international obligations come before their national duties, and unfortunately in the ranks of these traitors, English M.P.'s may be found, who receive £400 per annum from the British State, presumably to aid them in injuring the British cause.]
The error into which British Socialists have fallen—or been led—is their attitude towards militarism. German Democrats have never denounced the bearing of arms; they have admitted that arms will always be necessary, pre-supposing that the world continues along the same lines of development as heretofore.
They have only objected to the existing form[[65]] of militarism, but otherwise they have always been unanimous that military training should be compulsory and universal. Their British Genossen (comrades) have either misunderstood or wilfully perverted these teachings. German Socialists have unswervingly insisted upon every man learning the use of arms, while their British followers have preached absolute disarmament and done their utmost to betray this country into weakening herself below the minimum necessary to guard the land, and to maintain the country's pledges to the world.
[!-- Note Anchor 65 --][Footnote 65: Kautsky: "Die Internationalität und der Krieg" (Vorwärts Publishing House, Berlin, 1915), p. 26. "We have fought against the military system not to make the land defenceless, but in order to introduce another system in its place, which will give us the necessary guarantees that the army will always be the tool of the civil authorities and never their master. When the latter is the case we call such a condition 'militarism,' and it is against that alone that we fight." Seeing that military power is absolutely subordinated to the civil authorities in the case of Great Britain (Mutiny Acts), then according to the principles of German Socialists their British colleagues were wrong in all the efforts which they have made against the armed powers of these islands.]
In Halle, Herr Bebel made this statement: "I have already made it clear that I consider the efforts of the so-called peace friends towards disarmament to be useless (aussichtslos), because it is unthinkable that the rival States would agree to legal restrictions concerning disarmament. If such were made, each would endeavour by secret preparations to out-do the other. War and national enmity are necessary products of society, and the existing class distinctions."
The Germans were quite logical in this matter; in effect they said—the existing States and forms of government make militarism necessary, and war inevitable. Therefore we declare war to the knife on every existing government, including Russian Czarism, British constitutionalism, German autocracy and American republicanism. They are one and all rotten, unjust and inhuman. Our programme includes their complete overthrow and the erection in their stead of a Volksstaat (People's State).
The position is perfectly simple, and to those who are sufficiently ignorant and naïve this programme promises an universal salvation, as delirious in its joy as that expected by African races when bending the knee before images of wood and stone. German Socialists are pledged just as irrevocably to the doctrines of brute force as are the Junker and military powers in the German Fatherland. What is their industrial and class warfare but an attempt to enforce the doctrine of might is right?
In the official programme drawn up at Erfurt, 1891, there is a paragraph stating a claim for uneingeschränktes Koalitionsrecht (absolute and unlimited right of coalition), which means that the masses may unite to enforce what they will, and annihilate whom they please. The same rights of coalition are denied to anyone else, and in the coal-strikes in South Wales[[66]] we have a lurid example—such instances could not be found in Germany—of the absolute and unlimited right of coalition at the risk of undoing any and every other right.
[!-- Note Anchor 66 --][Footnote 66: The strikes during the present war.—Author.]