Page:Adolph Douai - Better Times (1877).djvu/30

 enter into a compact for the abolition of all war and for a World's Court of Justice to settle amicably all Economical and Political differences or disputes. Reason and Science to have a universal field of advisory and executive action.

This is a meagre outline of the future organization of Society as far as it now needs to be foreshadowed. This is the goal at which present knowledge of the spirit of the times bids us aim, leaving the specialties to future consideration. It is useless to declaim against this conception as a mere fancy picture, against this goal as an impossible, or far too arduous undertaking. Historical necessities are "stubborn things," which we either must comply with or perish; and where there is a will there's a way. The world is full of wisdom and knowledge now to serve all our purposes, provided we give it fair play. Infinitely more wisdom and knowledge is as yet squandered to defend, uphold, and patch up old worn out immoral institutions and superstitions, errors and vices, than there is applied to the solution of a future moral society. There is no lack of means to advance mankind on the largest scale; all that is wanted is unanimity of the workers of the foremost countries to be no longer harnessed to the wrong side of the wagon of progress.

It is, of course, of the first importance that not one Nation alone should try to realize our schemes of the regeneration of Society, but several of the prominent ones at the same time; otherwise every thoroughgoing reform would be a failure. Private capital is now internationally organized and confederated, the Party of Labor can not conquer it without an International Brotherhood.

But we of the United States are in this respect far less advanced than Europe is. We have not thirteen National Representatives, as our brothers in Germany have; we have not two millions of Nationally organized Trades Unionists, as our brothers in England and Scotland have; we have not even that degree of organization and influence which our brothers have in some of the most brutally governed states of the Old World. We must hurry up to fall into line with them, and to do our share of the Emancipation of the Laborers of the world. But whether we will or no, we shall be compelled to do it, and the later we resolve to do it the greater will meanwhile be our suffering, and the more difficult or desperate our task afterward. The United States is the one civilized country in which the rule of Capitalism is least limited, its progress quickest, its prejudices and superstitions most deeply rooted among the working people themselves. There is among us far more to do toward weaning the latter from their egoistic isolation. They