Socialism has lost its leader on the Continent; but it is solid and
representative on the main point; it loathes war; and it sees clearly
that war is always waged by working men who have no quarrel, but on the
contrary a supreme common interest. It steadily resists the dangerous
export of capital by pressing the need for uncommercial employment of
capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on
its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had
better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more
democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers
shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the
slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the
greatest battles known to history, such machine-carnages bore us so
horribly that we are ashamed of our ingratitude to our soldiers in not
being able to feel about them as about comparatively trumpery scraps
like Waterloo or even Inkerman and Balaclava. It never forgets that as
long as higher education, culture, foreign travel, knowledge of the
world: in short, the qualification for comprehension of foreign affairs
and intelligent voting, is confined to one small class, leaving the
masses in poverty, narrowness, and ignorance, and being itself
artificially cut off at their expense from the salutary pressure of the
common burden which alone keeps men unspoilt and sane, so long will that
small class be forced to obtain the support of the masses for its wars
by flattering proclamations of the national virtues and indignant
denunciations of the villanies of the enemy, with, if necessary, a
stiffening of deliberate falsehood and a strenuous persecution of any
attempt at inconvenient truthtelling. Here there is no question of the
Junker being a monster. You must rule ignoramuses according to their
ignorance. The priest must work bogus miracles for them; the man of
science must offer them magical cures and prophylactics; the barrister
must win their verdict by sophistries, false pathos, and appeals to