Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/222

 birth to a radical ministry, which at once finds itself bound hand and foot by all the diplomatic and military obligations and financial interests of the French bourse in Russia, Africa and Asia. Never ceasing to pronounce the proper pacifistic sentences, the ministry and the parliament automatically continue to carry on a world policy which involves France in war.

English and American pacifism, in spite of the differences in social and ideologic forms (or in the absence of such, as in America), is carrying on, at bottom, the same task; it offers to the petite and the middle bourgeoisie an expression for their fears of world cataclysms in which they may lose their last remnants of independence; their pacifism chloroforms their consciences—by means of impotent ideas of disarmament, international law and world courts—only to deliver them up body and soul, at the decisive moment, to imperialistic capital, which now mobilizes everything for its own purposes: industry, the church, art, bourgeois pacifism and patriotic "Socialism."

"We have always been opposed to war: our representatives, our ministry have been opposed to war," says the French citoyen, "therefore the war must have been forced upon us, and in the name of our pacifist ideals we must fight it to the finish." And the leader of the French pacifists, Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, indorses this pacifist philosophy of an imperialistic war with a pompous jusq'au bout ("to the end.")

The English Stock Exchange, in its prosecution of the war, had need first of all of pacifists of the Asquith (liberal) and Lloyd George (radical demagogue) type. "If this people go in for war," say the English masses, "right must be on our side." Thus a responsible function is allotted to pacifism in the economy of warfare, by the side of suffocating gases and inflated government loans.

More evident still is the subordinate role played by petit bourgeois pacifism with regard to Imperialism in the United States. The actual policy is there more prominently dictated by banks and trusts than anywhere else. Even before the war the United States, owing to the gigantic development of its industry and its foreign commerce, was being systematically driven in the direction of world interests and world policies. The European war imparted to this imperialistic development a speed that was positively feverish. At a time when many well-meaning persons were hoping that the horrors of the European slaughter might inspire the American bourgeoisie with a hatred of militarism, the actual influence of