Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/251

 and reaction, whose triumph, or simply whose maintenance, would threaten the world with an unbearable slavery, would crush all hope, all possibility of the political development of the proletariat, democracy is fighting.

No one could seriously contest that this War on the part of the Allied Powers is not both a War of Defence and Liberation. Certainly we admit, unanimously with the Allied Socialists represented at the Conference of London in 1915, that all Capitalist Governments have in this present conflict their share of the responsibility. But we state with this assembly that on the rulers of the Central Powers, and on them alone, lies the direct, immediate responsibility of the conflict.

International Capitalist Imperialism has created economic and political conditions which have rendered the catastrophe possible, but it is the reactionary military Imperialism of the Central Powers that has used these circumstances to attempt universal