Page:The General Strike (Haywood, ca 1911).pdf/38

36 certain it is that even though our comrades abroad were not perhaps so strong in their organization as we were or we so bold as they, yet the workers would still be able to organize sufficient militant strikes to make their government very reluctant to send their army out of the country.

Have we not seen by the huge military camps established in Liverpool, London and other great centers during the recent great strike period, that the master class feels none too safe, even when the workers are, as now, entirely unarmed? It would need but a comparatively small labor movement in England and Germany at the present time to make these governments very quickly change their minds as to who was the real enemy.

The danger of rebellion at home would make a fellow-feeling between the opposing governments, and they would very quickly agree to withdraw their armies to shoot their own countrymen. True it is, that we are not yet strong enough to thus defeat war and invasion, but great things have small beginnings, and if we are to wait until we can be successful before we throw our energies into a movement, we shall find that we are always behind. If we are but a few in this movement, which will by and by make war and oppression impossible, it is certain that we should exercise no more influence by joining the hosts of English, French, and Russian invaders than we have by raising the standard of revolt in our countries at home. Powerful, or even powerless then, as the workers' movement may now be, it should take up its stand of definite and uncompromising opposition to the war.

War is a part of the present system, but it is one of its most vulnerable parts, for the system is based on violence, and when the means of violence are fully occupied, a great opportunity occurs for those who have been kept in subjection and poverty by them at home. When we are prepared to take advantage of this opportunity, we shall find that we have not only rendered war