VI
All over the country now men were sending their sons to the
training-camps, and putting their money into "liberty-bonds". So
they were in no mood to listen to argument--they would fly into a
rage at the least hint that the cause in which they were making
sacrifices was not a perfectly just and righteous cause. There was
an organization called the "People's Council for Peace and
Democracy", which attempted to hold a national convention; the
gathering was broken up by mobs, and the delegates went wandering
over the country, trying in vain to get together. The mayor of
Chicago gave them permission to meet in that city, but the governor
of the state sent troops to prevent it! You see, the people of the
country had learned all about the organization for which Jerry
Coleman had been working--"Labour's National Peace Council"; and
here was another organization, bearing practically the same name,
and carrying on an agitation which seemed the same to the average
man. The distinction between hired treason and super-idealism was
far too subtle for the people to draw in a time of such peril.
It was becoming more and more the fashion to arrest Socialists and
to suppress their papers; the government authorities in many places
declared the "majority report" unmailable, and indicted state and
national secretaries for having sent it out in the ordinary routine
of their business. Jimmie received a letter from Comrade Meissner in
Leesville, telling him that Comrade "Jack" Smith had been given two
years in the penitentiary for his speech in the Opera-house, and the
other would-be speakers had been fined five hundred dollars each.
Several issues of the Worker had been barred from the mails, and now
the police had raided the offices and forced the suspension of the
publication. All over the country that sort of thing was happening,
so now if you argued with Jimmie in favour of the war, his answer
was that America was more Prussian than Prussia, and what was the
use of fighting for Democracy abroad, if you had to sacrifice every
particle of Democracy at home in order to win the fight?
Jimmie really believed this--he believed it with most desperate and
passionate intensity. He looked forward to a war won for the benefit
of oppression at home; he foresaw the system of militarism and
suppession riveted for ever on the people of America. Jimmie would
admit that the President himself might be sincere in the fine words
he used about democracy; but the great Wall Street interests which
had run the country for so many decades--they had their secret
purposes, for which the war-frenzy served as a convenient cloak.
They were going to make universal military service the rule in
America; they were going to see to it that every school-child
learned the military lessons of obedience and subordination. Also
they were going to put the radical papers out of business and put a
stop to all radical propaganda. Those Socialists who had been
trapped into supporting the President's war-programme would wake up
some morning with a fearful dark-brown taste in their mouths!
No, said Jimmie Higgins, the way to fight war was to resist the
subterfuges, however cunning and plausible, by which men sought to
persuade you to support war. The way to fight war was the way of the
Russians. The propaganda of proletarian revolt, the glorious example
which the Russian workers had set, would do more to break down the
power of the Kaiser than all the guns and shells in the world. But
the militarists did not want it broken that way--Jimmie suspected
that many of them would rather have the war won by the Kaiser than
have it won by the Socialists. The governments refused to give
passports to Socialists who wanted to meet in some neutral country
and work out the basis of a settlement upon which all the peoples of
the world might get together; and Jimmie took the banning of this
Socialist conference as the supreme crime of the world-capitalism,
it was evidence that world-capitalism knew its true enemy, and meant
to use the war as an excuse to hold that enemy down.
