These measures are presented as means of protecting the workers against the evil results of the present war. The danger of recurrence of war will exist as long as the capitalist system of industry remains in existence. The end of wars will come with the establishment of socialized industry and industrial democracy the world over. The Socialist party calls upon all the workers to join it in its struggle to reach this goal, and thus bring into the world a new society in which peace, fraternity, and human brotherhood will be the dominant ideals. 114 May, 1917. This is No. 5 of the Series of Organization Leaflets to be issued monthly by The National Office, Socialist Party Price 20c per hundred If This Interests You, Pass It On. $1.50 per thousand Subscribe to The American Socialist, published weekly by the National Office, 803 West Madison Street, Chicago, Ill., 50 cents per year, 25 cents for six months. It is a paper without a muzzle. 2. Said Adolph Germer, on June 26, 1917, at Chicago aforesaid, sold to A. Pauly, of 957 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, a large number, to wit, five thousand, copies of said pamphlet entitled "Proclamation and War Program." 3. Said Adolph Germer, on July 11, 1917, at Chicago aforesaid, sold to Scott Wilkins, of 715 West Pearl Street, Wapakoneta, Ohio, a large number, to wit, two thousand, copies of said pamphlet entitled "Proclamation and War Program." 4. Said Adolph Germer, on July 25, 1917, at Chicago aforesaid, sold to E. Wuethrick, of 1511 South Eighth Street, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a large num ber, to wit, three thousand, copies of said pamphlet entitled "Proclamation and War Program." 5. Said Adolph Germer, on August 8, 1917, at Chicago aforesaid, sold and sent to C. H. Leber, at 1521 Main Street, Reading, Ohio, a large number, to wit, twenty, copies of said pamphlet entitled "Down With War," each of the tenor following; that is to say: The workers of the United States have no desire and no reason to shed their blood. By a mere executive decree, the President of our country has broken off diplomatic relations with the German empire, and placed the people of the United States in imminent danger of being actively drawn into the mad war of Europe. During the last thirty months, the blackest months in the annals of human history, six million innocent men have been brutally killed, and many more millions have been crippled and maimed for life. Whole countries have been devastated and the accumulated treasurers of human industry and nature's generosity have been ruthlessly destroyed. Europe is a dread house of mourning in which the disconsolate sobs of the widows and orphans at home mingle with the agonized groans of the wounded and dying on the battlefield. In this savage carnival of wholesale and indiscriminate murder, there was but one powerful member of the family of nations that preserved an attitude of comparative sanity-the United States of America. Removed by the vast stretch of the Atlantic ocean, from the scene of the inhuman conflict, safe in our economic self-sufficiency, and proud of our advanced and democratic institution, we watched the self-destruction of our European brothers with bleeding hearts, eagerly waiting for the opportunity to bring them back to reason and peace, to life and happiness. And suddenly, with little notice or warning, without the sanction or consent of the people and without consultation with the people's chosen representatives in congress, we are practically ordered to join in the mad dance of death and destruction and to swell the ghastly river of blood in Europe with the blood of thousands of American workers. 116 The Socialist Party of the United States, speaking in behalf of hundreds of thousands of its adherents and in behalf of the working class of the country, enters a solemn protest against this wanton attempt to draw us into the European conflict. We are opposed to wars between nations because war is a reversion to brutal barbarism. We are opposed to the present threatened war in particular because no great war has ever been waged with less justification and on more frivolous pretexts. The policy of unrestricted and indiscriminate submarine warfare recently announced by the German government is most ruthless and inhuman, but so is war as a whole and so are all methods applied by both sides. War is murder. War is the climax of utter lawlessness, and it is idle to prate about lawful or lawless methods of warfare. The German submarine warfare does not threaten our national integrity or independence, not even our national dignity and honor. It was not aimed primarily at the United States and would not affect the American people. It would strike only those parasitic classes that have been making huge profits by manufacturing instruments of death or by taking away our food and selling it at exorbitant prices to the fighting armies of Europe. The workers of the United States have no reason and no desire to shed their blood for the protection and furtherance of the unholy profits of their masters and will not permit a lying and venal press to stampede them to taking up arms to murder their brothers in Europe. The six million men whose corpses are now rotting upon the battlefields of Europe were mostly workingmen. If the United States is drawn into war, it will be the American workers whose lives will be sacrificed-an inglorious, senseless sacrifice on the altar of capitalist greed. Workers of America, awake! The hour is grave; the danger is immi117 nent! Silence would be fatal! Gather the masses in meetings and demonstrations! Speak in unmistakable tones! Let your determined protest resound from one end of the country to the other! Send telegrams or letters to President Wilson, to the United States Senators and Congressmen. Demand that American citizens and American ships be forbidden to enter the war zone, except at their own risk. Insist that this nation shall not be plunged into war for the benefit of plundering capitalists. Down with war! Down with the inhuman social system that breeds war! Long live peace! Long live the International solidarity of the workers of all nations! The Above Proclamation Is Issued to the American People by the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party March, 1917 This is No. 3 of the Series of Organization Leaflets to be issued monthly by The National Office, Socialist Party 803 West Madison St., Chicago Price 10c per hundred If this interests you, pass it on. 75c per thousand Subscribe to the American Socialist, published weekly by the National Office, 50 cents per year, 25 cents for six months. 118 6. Said Adolph Germer, on June 19, 1917, at Chicago aforesaid, gave to the Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung an order to print a large number, to wit, one hundred thousand, copies of said pamphlet entitled "The Price We Pay," each of the tenor following, that is to say: The Price We Pay By Irwin St. John Tucker. I. Conscription is upon us; the draft law is a fact! Into your homes the recruiting officers are coming. They will take your sons of military age and impress them into the army; Stand them up in long rows, break them into squads and platoons, teach them to deploy and wheel; Guns will be put into their hands; they will be taught not to think, only to bey without questioning. Then they will be shipped thru the submarine zone by the hundreds of thousands to the bloody quagmire of Europe. Into that seething, heaving swamp of torn flesh and floating entrails they will be plunged, in regiments, divisions and armies, screaming as they go. Agonies of torture will rend their flesh from their sinews, will crack their bones and dissolve their lungs; and every pang will be multiplied in its passage to you. Black death will be a guest at every American fireside; mothers and fathers and sisters, wives and sweethearts will know the weight of that awful vacancy left by the bullet which finds its mark. And still the recruiting officers will come; seizing age after age, mounting up to the elder ones and taking the younger ones as they grow to soldier size; And still the toll of death will grow. 119 stone! Let them come! Let death and desolation make barren every home! Let the agony of war crack every parent's heart! Let the horrors and the miseries of the world-downfall swamp the happiness of every hearth Then perhaps you will believe what we have been telling you! For war is the price of your stupidity, you who have rejected Socialism! * II. Yesterday I saw moving pictures of the Battle of the Somme. A company of Highlanders was shown, young and handsome in their kilts and brass helmets and bright plaids. They laughed and joked as they stood on the screen in their ranks at ease, waiting the command to advance. The camera showed rank after rank, standing strong and erect, smoking and chaffing one with another; Then it showed a sign: "Less than 20 per cent of these soldiers were alive at the close of the day." Only one in five remained of all those laddies, when sunset came; the rest were crumpled masses of carrion under their torn plaids. Many a Highland home will wail and croon for many a year, because of these crumpled masses of carrion, wrapped in their plaids, upon a far French hillside. I saw regiments of Germans charging downhill against machine gunfire. They melted away like snowflakes falling into hotwater. The hospital camps were shown, with hundreds and thousands of wounded men in all stages of pain and suffering, herded like animals, milling round like cattle in the slaughter pens. All the horror and agony of war were exhibited; and at the end a flag was thrown on the screen, and a proclamation said: "Enlist for your country!" The applause was very thin and scattering; and as we went out, most of the men shook their heads and said: "That's a hell of a poor recruiting scheme! 120 For the men of this land have been fed full with horror during the past three years; and tho the call for volunteers has become will, frantic, desperate; tho the posters scream from every bill-board, and tho parader and red fire inflame the atmosphere in every town; The manhood of America gazes at that seething, heaving swamp of bloody carrion in Europe, and says "Must we-be that?" You cannot avoid it; you are being dragged, whipped, lashed, hurled into it; your flesh and brains and entrails must be crushed out of you and poured into that mass of festering decay; It is the price you pay for your stupidity-you who have rejected Socialism! * III. Food prices go up like sky-rockets; and show no sign of bursting and coming down. Wheat, potatoes, corn, are far above the Civil War mark; eggs, butter, meatall these things are almost beyond a poor family's reach. The Attorney General of the United States is so busy sending to prison men who do not stand up when the Star Spangled banner is played, that he has no time to protect the food supply from gamblers. Starvation begins to stare us in the face and we, people of the richest and most productive land on earth are told to starve ourselves yet further because Our allies must be fed. Submarines are steadily sending to the fishes millions of tons of food stuffs; and still we build more ships, and send more food; and more and more is sunk; Frantically we grub in the earth and sow and tend and reap; and then as frantically load the food in ships, and then as frantically sink with themWe, the "civilized nations" of the world! 121 While the children of the poor clamor for their bread, and the well to do shake their heads and wonder what on earth the poor folks are doing; The poor folks are growling and muttering with savage sidelong glances, and rolling up their sleeves. For the price they pay for their stupidity is getting beyond their power to pay! * IV. Frightful reports are being made of the ravages of venereal diseases in the army training camps, and in the barracks where the girl munition workers live. One of the great nations lost more men thru loathsome immoral diseases than on the firing line, during the first 18 months of the war. Back from the Mexican border our boys come, spreading the curse of the great Black Plague among hundreds of thousands of homes; blasting the lives of innocent women and unborn babes. Over in Europe ten millions of women are deprived of their husbands, and ifty millions of babies can never be; Of those women who will have their mates given back to them, there are twenty millions who will have ruined wrecks of men; mentally deranged, physically broken, morally rotten; Future generations of families are made impossible; blackness and desolation instead of happiness and love will reign where the homes of the future should De; And all because you believed the silly lie, that "Socialism would destroy the home!" Pound on, guns of the embattled hosts; wreck yet more homes, kill yet more husbands and fathers, rob yet more maidens of their sweethearts, yet more babies of their fathers; 122 That is the price the world pays for believing the monstrous, damnable, outrageous lie that Socialism would destroy the home! Now the homes of the world are being destroyed; every one of them would have been saved by Socialism. But you would not believe. Now pay the price! This War, you say, is all caused by the Kaiser; and we are fighting for democracy against autocracy. Once dethrone the Kaiser and there will be permanent peace. That is what they said about Napoleon. And in the century since Napoleon was overthrown there have been more and greater wars than the world ever saw before. There were wars before Germany existed; before Rome ruled; before Egypt dominated the ages. War has been universal; and the cause of war is always the same. Somebody wanted something somebody else possessed, and they fought over the ownership of it. This war began over commercial routes and ports and rights; and underneath all the talk about democracy versus autocracy, you hear a continual note, an undercurrent, a subdued refrain: "Get ready for the commercial war that will follow this war." Commercial war preceded this war; it gave rise to this war; it now gives point and meaning to this war; And as soon as the guns are stilled and the dead are buried, commercial forces will prepare for the next bloody struggle over routes and ports and rights, coal mines and railroads; For these are the essence of this, as of all other wars! This, you say, is a war for the rights of small nations;-and the first land sighted when you sail across the Atlantic is the nation of Ireland, which has suffered from England for three centuries more than what Germany has 123 inflicted upon Belgium for three years. But go to it! Believe everything you are told-you always have, and doubtless always will, believe them. Only do retain this much reason; when you have paid the price, the last and uttermost price; and have not received what you were told you were fighting for-namely Democracy Then remember that the price you paid was not the purchase price for justice, but the penalty price for your stupidity! We are beholding the spectacle of whole nations working as one person for the accomplishment of a single end-namely, killing. Every man, every woman, every child, must "do his bit" in the service of destruction. We have been telling you all for, lo, these many years that the whole nation could be mobilized and every man, woman and child induced to do his bit for the service of humanity; but you laughed at us. Now you call every person traitor, slacker, pro-enemy, who will not go crazy on the subject of killing; and you have turned the whole energy of all the nations of the world into the service of their kings for the purpose of killing-killingkilling. Why would you not believe us when we told you that it was possible to cooperate for the saving of life? Why were you not interested when we begged you to work all together to build, instead of destroy? To preserve, instead of to murder? 124 Why did you ridicule us and call us impracticable dreamers when we prophesied a world-state of fellow-workers, each man creating for the benefit of all the world, and the whole world creating for the benefit of each man? Those idle taunts, those thoughtless jeers, that refusal to listen, to be fairminded-you are paying for them now. -Lo, the price you pay! Lo, the price your children will pay. Lo, the agony, the death, the blood, the unforgettable sorrow.— The price of your stupidity! * VII. For this war, as every one who thinks or knows anything will say, whenever truth telling becomes safe and possible again,-This war is to determine the question, whether the chambers of commerce of the allied nations or of the Central Empires have the superior right to exploit undeveloped countries. It is to determine whether interest, dividends and profits, shall be paid to investors speaking German or to those speaking English and French. Our entry into it was determined by the certainty that if the allies do not win, J. P. Morgan's loans to the allies will be repudiated, and those American investors who bit on his promises would be hooked. Socialism would have settled that question; it would determine that to every producer shall be given all the value of what he produces; so that nothing would be left over for exploiters or investors. With that great question settled there would be no cause for war. Until the questions of surplus profits is settled that way, wars will continue; each war being the prelude to a still vaster and greater outburst of hell; Until the world becomes weary of paying the stupendous price for its own folly ; 125 Until those who are sent out to maim and murder one another for the profit of bankers and investors determine to have and to hold what they have fought for; Until money is no more sacred than human blood; Until human life refuses to sacrifice itself for private gain; |