Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/83

 40 make again ready for another "defensive" war, not one of those new-fangled "localized" wars, but a war of races—a war with the combined Sclavonian and Roman races.

The German working class have resolutely supported the war, which it was not in their power to prevent, as a war for German independence and the liberation of France and Europe from that pestilential incubus, the Second Empire. It was the German workmen who, together with the rural laborers, furnished the sinews and muscles of heroic hosts, leaving behind their half-starved families. Decimated by the battles abroad, they will be once more decimated by misery at home. In their turn they are now coming forward to ask for "guarantees"—guarantees that their immense sacrifices have not been brought in vain, that they have conquered liberty, that the victory over the Imperialist armies will not, as in 1815, be turned into the defeat of the German people; and, as the first of these guarantees, they claim an honorable peace for France, and the recognition of the French Republic.

The Central Committee of the German Socialist Democratic Workmen's party issued, on the 5th of September, a manifesto, energetically insisting upon these guarantees. "We," they say, "we protest against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. And we are conscious of speaking in the name of the German working class. In the common interest of France and Germany, in the interest of peace and liberty, in the interest of Western civilization against Eastern barbarism, the German workmen will not patiently tolerate the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. … We shall faithfully stand by our fellow-workmen in all countries for the common International cause of the Proletariat!"

Unfortunately, we cannot feel sanguine of their