Page:Scott Nearing - The Germs of War (1916).djvu/28



A chorus of protest sounds, "This preparedness is to defend American ideals, American homes, and American lives against the invader."

Therefore, we must increase our navy and our army. Therefore, we must spend more billions on war though we were, at the beginning of the European war, spending a larger portion of our national revenue on war than any other great nation. Still we are "defenseless" and "utterly at the mercy of a foreign foe."

If that is true, it might be sensible to ask what has become of the four and a quarter billions that we have spent during the past twenty years on the navy and the army, but that is incidental]. The real question is whether the most threatening enemies of American ideals are in Berlin or in New York.

No one has yet invaded the United States. Those worthy citizens who have looked under their beds for the Kaiser each night during the past eighteen months have not seen him once. The Japanese are thousands of miles from our shores. England and France have not attacked us. Why then this chorus of protest?

Why Lawrence?

Why Paterson?

Why Little Falls?

Why West Virginia?

Why Colorado?

Why Youngstown, and the copper strike, and the clothing strikes, and the machinists strikes?

Why this dissatisfaction? this unrest? this embryo revolution? Can it be that the noisome tenement rookeries; the squalid back alleys; the toiling children; the exploited women; the long hours of high pressure work; and the grinding tyranny of unlimited industrial power, have aroused the American people to revolt?