Page:The General Strike (Haywood, ca 1911).pdf/43

Rh show if they did. Nothing so well as these examples of friendship and comradeship among the men of the enemy armies can illustrate better the fact that the war is not ours or theirs. It is an affair of the governments and we have been asked to be fools enough to fight it. How thin is the mask of hatred that the rich and respectable have managed to stretch over the faces of the opposing countries! Through the mask we are constantly seeing appears that look of comradeship and fellow feeling which is destined by and by to bring together the workers of all lands in a common brotherhood. How clearly we may see how the last war will be reached—when the workers "will be fed up and refuse to go on shooting."

The Final Victory. Our program is now becoming clear. It is based upon two simple facts. The first is that the human race has reached a stage where it can command more wealth and luxury, and combat suffering far better than any other race of animals on the earth. The second is that the human race has reached a stage where it is beset with more poverty and suffers more pain than any other race of animals.

These are the great outstanding facts that demand attention. To be so powerful to produce richness and yet so powerless to prevent abject poverty and starvation is surely an absurdity. At the whim of any rich man a palace of infinite beauty and luxury is hewn out of the stone and takes shape and form, but the thousands in our slums live and die generation after generation in fruitless longing, for they are ever surrounded in their hovels by dirt and poverty.

It is to this great contradiction in human affairs—on the one hand our undoubted power to achieve great things of infinite worth, and on the other our inability even to fill our stomachs or supply ourselves with clean beds on which to lie—it is this that demands the first attention of all who would work in any great cause. It