Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/160

 128 fenceless crowds, how it is even customary to continue firing into and slashing at the fleeing, dispersed crowd. He sums up by stating that in Italy the "bullets of the King" shatter the bones of Italian workmen every year perhaps some five, six or even ten times. He points out that the Italian bourgeoisie, the author of those massacres, is among the most narrow-minded, backward bourgeois classes of the world, that in the eyes of these capitalists Socialism is not a political philosophy, but a species of criminal disposition, criminal propensity, the most dangerous for public order. He quotes the words written by the Milan newspaper Idea liberale on the morrow of the butchery of Grammichele: "Killed and wounded—those people have met the fate they deserve—the grape-shot, that is the most precious element of civilization and order."

After such samples one need not be astonished to hear that even a so-called democratic government, like that of Giolitti, never could be got to call the military to account for their bloodthirsty barbarities, but rather praised them officially "for