Page:The General Strike (Haywood, ca 1911).pdf/23

Rh we must be guided in our judgment by something greater than this patriotism which allows us to see one side of the question only.

Let us frankly confess to ourselves what we have done. We are certainly not a savage or blood-thirsty people in our everyday life, and yet we are now doing, or helping others to do the bloodiest deeds that imagination and science can make possible.

The truth is we are, as a people, at that stage when we don't really believe in anything. The teachings of two thousand years ago will not fit the affairs of today. Most of us are a little afraid to say we will have no more to do with them, but we should be still more afraid to start practising them.

Turning from religion, we fall back on our faith in patriotism, but, as we have already seen, it is an ill guide to reason. Finally, we don't know in what we believe, and as a result—because we have no definite ideas about life and what it means to us and what we mean to it—we have allowed ourselves to be thus easily led into killing one another, when really we have no liking for the occupation. Those who have led us, we may be assured, have their ideas fixed and firm. The Kaiser and his gang have their views about the German empire and its future, and this makes their action purposeful and therefore powerful. The Czar of Russia and his friends, who have been hanging or imprisoning every thinker in Russia for many years, they have their reasons for joining in this great game of finance and murder. The politicians of France and England too know what they are about—but what of us? We who are not politicians, or kings, or czars, or kaisers; we who serve in the shops, who work in the factories, drive the trams—and, in a word, make and distribute all that is necessary for life; we surely have a very different view of things from those who have organized this war and who call on us to fight it.

If we had a clear idea of life and its purpose, if we knew what we wanted as clearly as do these great men,