"No war shall curse this land...

At the moment of filing this message...

...the nations which have drunk the wine cup of madness are eight and by the time this reaches the APPEAL TO REASON readers there is a possibility that Italy, Holland, and Japan may bring the total to eleven. It includes an overwhelming majority of the population of the civilized world. seventeen millions of men are suddenly withdrawn from productive industries and set to destroying what they have previously produced. Earnest, patient, workingmen, men who have not the remotest quarrel with one another, are dragged from their wives and children and sent out to murder each other with the most intricate and expensive machines that human ingenuity has been able to devise.

I assert that never before in human history has there been a war with less pretense of justification. It is the supreme crime of the ages, a blow to the very throat of civilization. The three nations that began it, Austria, Russia, and Germany, are governed, the first by a dodering imbecile, the second by a weak-minded melancholic, and the third by an epileptic degenerate, drunk upon the vision of himself as the war lord of Europe. Behind each of these men is a little clique of blood-thirsty aristocrats. They fall into a quarrel among themselves. The pretext is that Serbia instigated the murder of the hier apparent to the Austrian throne. There is good reason for believing that as a matter of fact this murder was instigated by the war party in Austria because the heir apparent had democratic and anti-military tendancies. First they murder him and then they use his death as a pretext for plunging the whole of civilization into murderous strife.

The people of the world did not want this war. They are forced into it at the point of the bayonet. An iron first is close about the throat of civilization. Every cry of protest is strangled. The greatest voice of freedom in Europe, Juares, is shot down in cold blood. Thousands of Socialists in Germany and Austria are imprisoned or shot and not a line of the news is permitted to reach the world and this is what we call civilization. This is what capitalism has given us. This is madness and horror beyond all imagination.

Either this is the end of capitalism in Europe or else it is the end of civilization, one thing or the other. The four million Socialists of Germany, the million Socialists of France, who have been driven out like wild beasts to fight each other in array, if they do not find some way to punish the authors of this infamy, if they do not find some way to change the system which places the destinies of millions of civilized and intelligent people in the hands of a few uniformed and epauletted fiends, it will mean that the light of human hope will go out in Europe forever. It is inthinkable that this horror should not result in some attempt at revolution abroad, and it is for us to voice the outraged feeling of humanity in this crisis and to send to out comrades in Europe the message that the hunger for righteousness is not altogether dead in the world. We must go out and educate the American people into the meaning of this collapse of civilization. We must explain the forces of greed which made it possible. These same forces are at work in America already. Under the Dick Military bill every man of us is liable to be driven to war as our comrades in Germany and Framce were driven. Here, exactly as in Europe, the choice is between Socialism and an empire, and it for us to open the eyes of the people before it is too late and save at least one portion of the civilized world from the powers of greed and oppression. Upon Socialists in this hour falls the gravest responsibility and every one of us must go to work with the knowledge that upon the issue of our efforts rests the future of the human race.