Section one: Modern murdering machinery.

Ah, so you are on your way to the recruiting station, are you? Well, there will be plenty of time to enlist tomorrow, and there are also seven days of next week that have not been touched yet. Do not be in a hurry to sign your name. Wait a little—wait at least till you have read the first two sections of this chapter.

Perhaps you are feverish.

Cool off before you enlist.^[67]

Go back to the 60’s and read three or four lines of American Civil War history before you enlist. Here they are in the words of a distinguished authority, A. S. Bolles:^[68]

“With the swift cooling of the war fever bounties became necessary to stimulate enlistment.... In 1861 the highways were filled with volunteers eagerly rushing to the front; but in 1865 they went with much slower pace and with a much better conception of the hazardous game of war.”

The hateful method called drafting had to be vigorously applied by the Federal Government after the young men found out what war really meant—for them.

And Professor John B. McMaster (University of Pennsylvania) makes it clear that even the hot blood of the young men of the South also cooled down to an extremely rational temperature as the slaughter proceeded. He says:^[69]

“Quite as desperate were the shifts to which the South was put for soldiers. At first every young man was eager to rush to the front. But as time passed... it became necessary to force men into the ranks, to ‘conscript’ them....”

In this connection read the words of a great Union soldier, General Sherman:

“I confess without shame that I am tired and sick of the war. Its glory is all moonshine. Even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, the anguish and lamentations of distant families appealing to me for missing sons, husbands and fathers. It is only those who have not heard a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”^[70]

It is especially important that before you enlist you should get a distinct idea of the horrible deadliness of modern butchering machinery. Since General Sherman made the comment just quoted on the American Civil War the killing machinery has been improved astonishingly.

In the recent Russian-Japanese war individual soldiers, as shown by actual count and official report, received as many as seventy bullet wounds,—they were riddled—torn to pieces—with lead and steel fired from MODERN slaughtering machines. If you will read all of the present and the following sections you will no longer wonder why the “very BEST people” do not enlist for actual service—at the front.

I would suggest and even urge, brothers, that, before you enlist, you visit your dear pastor and read with him all of the present section on “Hell,” and then ask him whether he and his sons will probably enlist for actual firing-line-sword-rifle-and-bayonet service. Also have a heart-to-heart talk with your loving friend, your banker, who takes care of your money for you. Read these paragraphs to him and ask him whether he is eager to rush to the front and whether he is urging his sons and sons-in-law to be ready to rush with him to the front for real fighting into “the grasp of death,” into “the hurricane’s fiery breath,” where sabres flash, bullets hiss, and cannon roar.

By the way, do you deposit much money in the bank? Do you often visit socially at the banker’s home? Did you ever see a cheap, fifteen-dollar-a-month soldier courting the banker’s or the big manufacturer’s daughter?

Well, hardly.

Wake up, my working class brother.

These leading citizens strut before you and fill you full of fierce and splendid talk about becoming “brave boys behind the gun”; but at the same time they despise you socially. Don’t foolishly get behind the gun or in front of the gun—not at least till you have studied the gun.

A high-grade modern rifle can be fired twenty-five times per minute. This gun will pierce 60 pine boards each one inch thick. It will kill a man at a distance of four miles. A bullet with sufficient force to pierce a one-inch pine board will kill a man or a horse. Actual tests show that the best modern rifles will force a bullet through a target made of the following combination:—fifteen folds of cow-hide, sixteen one-inch pine boards, and one and four-fifths inches of hard beech wood. Bullets fired from rifles used in the American Civil War would do little damage after passing into or through the bodies of soldiers in the front ranks. Men in the second and third ranks felt much protected by the bodies of men in front of them. All is different now. The best modern rifles will force a bullet through five horses at 27 yards; four horses at 220 yards; two horses at 1,100 yards. Even as recently as the war of 1870–71 and the war of 1877–78, bullets from rifles then used in the German army would not pierce a human skull at a distance of 1,760 yards, one mile; but with the best modern rifles bullets can be fired through the thick bones of an ox at a range of 3,850 yards, about two and one-fifth miles. Experiments demonstrate that the best modern rifles will force a bullet through three human bodies at a range of 3,900 feet; and through five human bodies at 1,200 feet. In the American Civil War bullets for long range work had to be fired high, describing a long high arch, thus missing all objects on the battlefield between the gun and the object aimed at. A bullet from a modern rifle will fly straight across the field for hundreds of yards with no elevation, even half a mile and more with but little elevation, sweeping the whole width of the field between the gun and the target.^[71]

The deadliness of the modern rifle can be made clear in another way. Says Bloch:

“According to the data of the Prussian general Rohne one hundred sharp-shooters will put a battery out of action, firing at a distance of 88 yards in the course of two and two-fifths minutes, 1,100 yards in the course of four minutes, 1,320 yards in the course of seven and a half minutes, 1,650 yards in the course of twenty-two minutes.”

“The new Springfield rifle,” says Fitzmorris,^[72] “has a range of five miles, the bullet having a velocity of 2,300 feet per second leaving the weapon, or sufficient to drive it through four and a half feet of white pine.”

The “attractiveness” of war increases, of course, with the likelihood that the improving marksmanship of the enemy will increase one’s chances for meeting an “attraction.” The accuracy of fire is being rapidly improved by tireless target practice in all the great armies of the world. Says Mr. Wright, Ex-Secretary of War:^[73]

“The results from target practice for the year 1907 and 1908 show that the average battery-hitting capacity has been rapidly increased.... About sixteen times as many hits were made in 1906 from the same gun in a given time at the same range as were made in 1900.”

Under no circumstances should the delicate flesh of a big business man be exposed to well-aimed bullets fired from a modern rifle. His flesh is, of course, specially sensitive and precious. Moreover, it is wholly unnecessary, because he can buy the flesh of a common working class man for bullet stopper purposes very, very cheap, as a substitute. That is a much better arrangement, the big business man thinks, and, of course, the working men agree with the business men on this matter just as they do on nearly everything else.

The Danish “Rexer” rifle is another instrument ready for use in war and in pacifying hungry people on strike. The “Rexer” weighs only eighteen pounds, uses high-power, small-calibre ammunition, is easily and accurately operated from a handy, portable “rest,” can be conveniently carried on horseback, rushed up front for short distances by infantry, can be fired slowly or, if desired, by simply holding the trigger, 300 times per minute. Equipped with this rifle one full regiment of soldiers or militiamen, each firing only 75 shots per minute, could fire into the ranks of wildly hungry strikers or unemployed one million five hundred thousand prosperity slugs in twenty minutes. With this gun ten militiamen could “quiet” five thousand strikers with twenty-five thousand shots in ten minutes.^[74]

With the improved murdering machine called the Maxim gun 700 bullets per minute can be fired, bullets that will kill a man at a range of one and a half miles, bullets that will pacify a striker at a range of two miles. The Gatling gun equipped with an electric motor will discharge 1,800 death-dealing bullets per minute.^[75]

“The Gatling gun,” says Morris,^[76] “... is now, in its perfected form, in use all over the world. This consists of a cluster of rifle-barrels arranged around a central shaft and rotated by a crank. The magazine contains a supply of cartridges, which drop down and are rammed home one after another as the barrels rotate. This, in the later improved forms, is done with such rapidity that the gun can discharge its balls at the rate of 3,000 per minute.... Machine guns were designed for service against bodies of men.”

One modern gatling gun will tear a board fence to pieces a mile away in four minutes, and at a range of one mile it will gnaw off a foot-thick pine post in seven minutes.

Don’t enlist till next week.

No wonder the politicians and big business men are “too busy” to get in line on the firing-line—patriotically. And, of course, they do not want their sons and sons-in-law to get up close in front of a belching Gatling gun,—in front of a modern murdering machine—patriotically.

If a battery of modern gatling guns, concealed, using smokeless powder, located out of hearing a mile away or nearer and equipped with a maxim noiseless attachment,—should be trained upon a regiment of men, each gun pouring one thousand bullets per minute into an exposed regiment, the only observable result would be this: the regiment would melt, stricken by an unseen, unheard breath of death.

General William P. Duval, of the United States Military Staff and War College, estimates that the Maxim noiseless attachment for fire-arms “would produce just as much of a revolution in the art of war as did the smokeless powder. Psychologically, this new gun would double the terror inspired by the enemy possessing it.... The fear of the enemy would ... at least be doubled.”

Ordering the working class to go to war with the present fire-arms is like ordering a working man to make a gun, load it, dig his own grave, crawl down into it, and there scream “Hurrah for death!” and then shoot himself.

Perhaps the best way, at least the safest way, to get an accurate idea of the effectiveness of the slaughtering machinery of our day is to read what these guns accomplish in actual operation on the battlefield, pouring showers, streams, storms of lead and steel into the ranks of men. The propaganda of peace is powerfully served by books giving distinct impressions of war as it may be seen (and felt) on the field where modern arms are used. Some specially excellent books for such use are: Human Bullets, by T. Sakurai, a Japanese soldier;^[77] Port Arthur, A Monster Heroism, by Richard Barry;^[78] The Red Laugh, by Leonid Andreief;^[79] The Downfall, by Emile Zola;^[80] The Future of War, by Jean Bloch.^[81]

Here following are some paragraphs from a vigorous book of this type, Human Bullets, just noted, passim, which treats of the Russian-Japanese War:

“The dismal horror of it [battle] can best be observed when the actual struggle is over. The shadow of impartial Death visits friend and foe alike. When a shocking massacre is over, countless corpses covered with blood lie flat in the grass and between the stones. What a deep philosophy their cold faces tell! When we saw the dead at Nanshan, we could not help covering our eyes in horror and disgust.... Some were crushed in head and face. Their brains mixed with dust and earth. The intestines were torn out and blood was trickling from them.... Some had photographs of their wives and children in their bosoms, and these pictures were spattered with blood.... After this battle we captured some damaged machine-guns. This fire-arm was most dreaded by us.... It can be made to sprinkle its shots as roads are watered with a hose. It can cover a larger or smaller space, or fire to greater or less distance as the gunner wills.... If one becomes the target for this terrible engine of destruction, three or four shots may go through the same place making a wound very large.... And the sound it makes... is like a power-loom. It is a sickening horrible sound! The Russians regarded this machine as their best friend. And it certainly did very much as a means of defense. They were wonderfully clever in the use of this machine. They would wait till our men came very near them, four or five ken only, and just as we were ready to shout a triumphant ‘Banzai!’ this dreadful machine would begin to sweep over us the besom of destruction, the result being hills and mounds of dead. After this battle we discovered one soldier... who had no less than forty-seven shots in his body.... Another soldier of a neighboring regiment received more than seventy shots. These instances prove how destructive is the machine-gun. The surgeons could not locate so many wounds in one body, and they invented a new name [meaning] ‘whole-body-honey-combed-with-gun-wounds.’ ... It was invariably this machine-gun that made us suffer most severely.... The bodies of the brave dead built hill upon hill, their blood made streams in the valley. Shattered bones, torn flesh, flowing blood, were mingled with broken swords and split rifles. What could be more shocking than this scene! We jumped over or stepped on the heaped up corpses and went on holding our noses. What a grief it was to have to tread on the bodies of our heroic dead!... What a horrible sight! Their bodies were piled up two or three or even four deep.... A sad groaning came from the wounded who were buried under the dead. When this gallant assaulting column had pressed upon the enemy’s forts, stepping over their dead comrades’ bodies, the terrible and skilful fire of the machine-guns had killed them all, close by the forts, piling the dead upon the wounded.... After a while the shells... began to burst briskly above our heads. Percussion balls fell around us and hurled up smoke and blood together. Legs, hands and necks were cut into black fragments and scattered about. I shut my eyes....”

In what unqualified contempt do the masters of the world hold the toilers whom they send into such blood-wasting hells. Shakespeare has expressed the masters’ scorn for the common soldier’s flesh and blood thus:

“Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder; food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better.”

Here is a glimpse of the battle of Sedan:^[82]

“Let your readers fancy masses of colored rags glued together with blood and brains, pinned into strange shapes by fragments of bones. Let them conceive men’s bodies without legs, and legs without bodies, heaps of human entrails attached to red and blue cloth, and disembowelled corpses in uniform, bodies lying about in all attitudes with skulls shattered, faces blown off, hips smashed, bones, flesh and gay clothing all pounded together as if brayed in a mortar, extending for miles, not very thick in any one place, but recurring perpetually for weary hours, and then they can not with the most vivid imagination come up to the sickening reality of that butchery [the battle of Sedan, 1870].”

It is reliably estimated that modern artillery is capable of doing one hundred and sixteen times more damage than the artillery used by the German army in 1870. Even the simple instrument known as the range-finder adds much to effectiveness,—it enables soldiers to find the range in three minutes and pour death-dealing missiles into the human targets promptly. This instrument weighs about sixty pounds and is being rapidly improved.^[83] A single battery of modern artillery can hurl 1,450 rounds upon ten regiments of men while they march one mile and a half. These 1,450 shells arranged with time fuses to burst at the target would sweep these ten thousand men with 275,000 bullets and ragged iron scraps. Bloch says:^[84]

“In 1870 an ordinary shell when it burst broke into from 19 to 30 pieces. Today it bursts into 240 pieces. Shrapnel in 1870 scattered only 37 death-dealing missiles. Now it scatters 340. A bomb weighing about 70 pounds, thirty years ago, would have burst into 42 fragments. Today, when it is charged with peroxilene, it breaks into 1,200 pieces, each of which is hurled with much greater velocity than the larger lumps which were scattered by a gunpowder explosion. It is estimated that such a bomb would destroy all life within a range of 200 metres [about 200 yards] of the point of the explosion.... With the increase in the number of bullets and fragments, and in the forces which disperse them, increases also the area which they affect. Splinters and bullets bring death and destruction, not only as in 1870, to those in the vicinity of the explosion, but at a distance of 220 yards away, and this tho’ fired from a distance of 3,300 yards [about two miles].... In a time when rifle and artillery fire were beyond comparison weaker than they are now, those who were left unhelped on the battlefield might hope for safety. But now, when the whole field of battle is covered with an uninterrupted hail of bullets and fragments of shells [at night too, with a searchlight equipment], there is little place for such hope.”

Surely you can easily see that a business man’s soft, fat flesh won’t do for a bullet-stopper. Here is where the cheap, meek, weak wage-slaves come in handy—the very stuff for bullet-stoppers.

In connection with this subject, remember that a bullet fired from a modern rifle or a Gatling gun rotates over 3,800 times per second. This rotary motion produces the effect of an explosion when the bullet strikes the stomach, bladder, or heart—where there are liquids. The effect is horrible; with terrible violence “the liquids are cast on all sides with the destructive effect of an explosion.”—(Bloch.)

Of course, the business man knows that his flesh should never be torn with such a horrible thing. He has nothing to fear, however. He will not go to war. He will send a cheap man, a wage-slave substitute. He knows it doesn’t make any difference in the case of a cheap wage-earner who is only a working-class slave.

Ah, my working-class reader, it will make a difference when the working class become proud enough and shrewd enough to defiantly declare that it shall be different. The business man is too proud and shrewd to stand up before these modern flesh-tearing machines.

Don’t be in a hurry to enlist, brother. Wait a few more days. Two weeks after next will do. The “very best people” in your town are not hurrying to enlist. Can’t you see the point? Before you enlist, or before you consent to have your son or younger brother enlist, be sure to read some books describing real war with improved murdering machinery. A brilliant war correspondent, Mr. Richard Barry, thus describes a modern war-storm in his book, descriptive of the Japanese-Russian War, Port Arthur, A Monster Heroism, passim:^[85]

“Toward three o’clock a second advance is ordered... nearly 15,000 men close in... now they are through [the wire fence] ... half naked, savage, yelling, even Japanese stoicism gone. Up to the very muzzles of the first entrenchments they surge, waver and break like the dash of angry waves against a rock-bound coast.... Officers are picked off by sharp-shooters, as flies are flecked from a molasses jug.... So up they go, for the tenth time.... Spottsylvania Court House was no more savage.... Thus hand to hand they grapple, sweat, bleed, shout, expire. The veneer of culture sloughed as a snake his cast-off skin; they spit and chew, claw and grip as their forefathers beyond the memory of man.... The cost! The fleeing ones left five hundred corpses in four trenches. The others paid seven times that price—killed and wounded—to turn across the page of the world’s warfare that word Nanshan.... A hospital ship left every day for Japan carrying from 200 to 1,000.... I lay in the broiling sun watching the soldiers huddle against the barbed-wire, under the machine guns... only to melt away like chaff before a wind.... The ‘pioneers’ met with the death-sprinkle of the Maxim [guns]... a machine rattled and the shale beyond spattered. I was carried back [in memory] to a boiler factory and an automatic riveter. Of all war sounds that of the machine gun is least poetic, is most deadly.... The regiment under fire of the machine guns retreated precipitately, leaving one-half its number on the slope.... Overwhelmed on all sides, tricked, defeated, two-thirds of its men killed or wounded... for out of that [another] brigade of 6,000 men there are... uninjured but 640.... Moreover in throwing up their trenches... corpses had to be used to improvise the walls.... The dead were being used to more quickly fill the embankments.... Soon dawn came and with it hell. The battle was on again. Within his sight were more than a hundred dead and twice as many wounded. Groans welled up like bubbles from a pot. Arms tossed feverishly. Backs writhed in despair.... Almost crazed by thirst and hunger, he [a wounded soldier unattended for days on the battlefield] at length severed the arteries of one of his comrades newly dead, and lived on [that is, sucked blood from a comrade’s corpse?]. He found worms crawling in the wounds of his legs. He tore up the shirt of a corpse and bound them.... How like a living thing a shell snarls—as some wild beast, in ferocious glee thrusting its cruel fangs in earth and rock, rending livid flesh with its savage claws, and its fetid breath of poison powder scorching in the autumn winds.... All the way up the base of the hill... they were almost unmolested.... This made them confident. But the Russian general... had ordered his men to reserve their fire till we got within close range, and then to give it to us with machine guns.... The aim was so sure and firing so heavy that nearly two-thirds of the command was mowed down at once.... Then came the thud of a bullet. It was a different thud from any we had heard up to that time, and though I had never before heard bullet strike flesh, I could not mistake the sound. It goes into the earth wholesome and angry, into flesh ripping and sick with a splash like a hoof-beat of mud in the face.... The parapets of four forts were alive with bursting shrapnel. A hundred a minute were exploding on each (at fifteen gold dollars apiece). The air above them was black with glycerine gases of the motor shells, and the wind blowing... held huge quantities of dust.... ‘No, the truth about war can not be told. It is too horrible. The public will not listen. A white bandage about the forehead with a strawberry mark in the center—is the picture they want of the wounded. They won’t let you tell them the truth and show bowels ripped out, brains spilled, eyes gouged away, faces blanched with horror.... Archibald Forbes predicted twenty years ago that the time would come when armies would no longer be able to take their wounded from the field of battle. That day has come. We are living in it. Wounded have existed—how, God knows—on that field out there without help for twelve days, while shells and bullets rained about them, and if a comrade had dared to come to their assistance, his would have been a useless suicide. The searchlight, enginery of scientific trenches, machine-guns, rifles point blank at 200 yards with a range of over 2,000—these things have helped to make war more terrible than ever before in history. Red Cross societies and scientific text-books—they sell well and look pretty, but as for “humane warfare”—was there ever put into words a mightier sarcasm!’”

Read all of Mr. Barry’s thrilling book and thus learn why the haughty “very best people,” who despise the workingmen, socially, don’t go themselves, up close, to the foul and bloody hell called war.

In the Russian-Japanese war 275 officers and 1,349 men were treated in a single hospital for insanity. Says Dr. Awtokratow:

“As might be anticipated, in the acute insanities, particularly in neurasthenic and confusional cases, the influence of the war gave a characteristic color to the mental symptoms, phases of panic terror, with hallucinations of bursting shells, pursuing enemies, putrefying corpses, and so forth, being especially frequent.”^[86]

A special despatch in the New York Times of December 11, 1909, reads:

“A carload of insane soldiers from the Philippines passed through Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania] today in charge of Major J. M. Kennedy, who was taking them to Washington from the Pacific Coast.”^[87]

The soldiers of the American Civil War did not use—had not even heard of—the terrible explosives of our day. Melinite, dynamite, cordite, indurite, motorite, ecrasite, peroxilene and other explosive compounds vastly increase the effectiveness of modern arms and in other ways also multiply the dangers of the modern battlefield.

Mr. Charles Morris describes a dynamite gun as follows:^[88]

“The dynamite gun, compressed air usually being employed, while forty feet long, has a barrel of three-eighth inch iron, with one-eighth inch brass tubing. The projectile is of brass, forty inches long, rotation being given it by spiral vanes fixed to its base. It has a conical cast-iron point, twelve inches long. At a trial in 1895 shells were thrown as far as two thousand five hundred yards, and one containing one hundred pounds of dynamite was thrown a distance of two miles. Great accuracy of aim was attained. This dangerous weapon is an object of dread by naval officers.”

Writing of modern explosives, M. Bloch says, in substance: Such enormous energy is developed in firing cannon using some of these explosives that gun, gunners and horses have been dragged a considerable distance. In the case of a shell exploding by slight accident due to excitement the body of the gun was broken into twenty pieces, the carriage and wheels were reduced to a pile of shapeless steel and wooden splinters; single fragments of the destroyed gun “weighed 363 pounds and were hurled 99 yards forward and backward from the place where the gun was fired, and nearly 108 yards on either side.” He calls special attention to the dangers due to having such explosives on the field of battle. He says:^[89]

“Notwithstanding the distance between guns, a single explosion might embrace several guns and all their ammunition.

“Not far from the battery ammunition cases will be placed. If these be not exploded by the concussion of the atmosphere they may very easily be exploded by some of the heavy fragments which fall upon them.”

Let us look for a moment at a new kind of storm—a possible dynamite storm.

A rifle bullet fired into a stick of dynamite will explode the dynamite. A bullet accidentally fired from a high-power rifle into a dynamite factory even a mile distant might easily destroy the entire factory and destroy at the same time all life in and within hundreds of yards of the factory, because of the highly explosive nature of the dynamite. The same is true of factories in which other terrible explosives are being prepared for use on the battlefield. Such explosive materials in chests on the field of battle create, of course, enormous danger that thousands may be destroyed with their own ammunition. One steel bullet, or one shell, fired from a modern high-power gun into a chest of shells or bombs, loaded as they are with highly explosive material,—one such bullet or shell thus fired, might set off a chest of shells and carry death to all around, these shells, exploding other chests of shells, and these still others, creating a sort of hell in all directions. The possibilities thus created by modern highly explosive ammunition materials are terrible, horrible to contemplate. Suppose ten thousand men on the battlefield, and suppose an explosion due to a single shell crashing into a chest of shells. A series of explosions might follow. The first explosion, caused by one shot, might be communicated from the first bursting shell to the next, and so on in succession with startling rapidity. The thundering explosions would cause a cyclone of flying splinters of wood and steel, scrap-iron, cannon barrels, wagon wheels, the torn carcasses, the mingled flesh, blood and bones of dismembered horses and men,—a storm of hopeless and hideous confusion, a harvest of death utterly indescribable. Thousands of brave young fellows from the farm, factories, mines and other industries would thus be practically annihilated with their own ammunition.

What a place this would be (up close) for “prominent citizens”—bankers, priests, preachers, bishops, senators, lawyers and “captains of industry”! A storm of blood and steel! No, brother, oh, no. No dynamite cyclone for these pulmonary patriots. Hardly. There is plenty of “common” flesh and “common” blood of the “plain people” which can be bought cheap, dirt cheap.

Reflect for a moment on the horrible possibilities of the airship carrying a light machine gun with a good supply of ammunition, or carrying 1,000 or 1,500 pounds of dynamite aloft over an army, a city, or a fleet. The airship, though still very new, is already sufficiently developed to make it practicable to work wholesale ruin in this way. In March, 1909, Count Zeppelin’s dirigible airship, 445 feet long, 50 feet in diameter, carrying three motors, a searchlight, and twenty-five people, fifteen of them soldiers, made a hundred-and-fifty-mile trip at the rate of almost forty miles an hour. Hudson Maxim, the inventor and expert in high explosives, torpedo boat-destroyers, noiseless gun attachments, and the like, speaks thus of the airship as a fighting machine:^[90]

“The great field for operations with high explosives carried in airships will be the raiders’ outfit. Aerial raiders would be able to do wide destruction on unprotected inland cities and towns, destroying railroads, blowing up bridges, arsenals, public stores, powder magazines and powder mills, and in levying ransom on moneyed institutions.... In future wars, the fronts of battle will be skyline and opposing skyline, and over the stupendous arena missiles of death will shriek and roar, while sharp-shooters with silent rifles will make ambush in copse and every hedge and highway.”

Now let us look for a moment at the greater cannon.

“A day will come,” said Victor Hugo,^[91] “when a cannon will be exhibited in the public museums, just as an instrument of torture is now, and people will be astonished how such thing could have been.”

The new 14–inch gun fires a 1,600–pound projectile. Used at its maximum capacity it puts itself out of commission in six and one-half hours because of the frightful wear of the gun’s heavy charges upon itself.^[92] The 16–inch seacoast gun exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1904 is officially described as having a “muzzle energy of projectile... 76,904 foot tons.”

“The Masonic Temple in Chicago, until recently the largest office building in the world, weighs 30,000 tons. In firing a 14–inch gun, sufficient energy is developed to lift the Masonic Temple two feet in one second. The force behind a single eight-gun broadside from 14–inch guns would raise that building sixteen feet in a single second.”^[93]

The United States Government has a 16–inch cannon; it can throw a shot weighing 2,000 pounds to an extreme range of twenty-one miles, and has an effective range of twelve miles. It has been fired four times.

And now think of a murdering machine 50 feet long, weighing 260,000 pounds, consuming 612 pounds of smokeless powder per charge, firing a projectile weighing 2,400 pounds through 23½ inches of Krupp steel armor, and having a range of almost nine miles—a monster butchering machine. The United States Government exhibited such a gun at the World’s Fair, at St. Louis, in 1904,—exhibited this hell’s masterpiece with pride, true, Christian, savage pride.

This huge gun was exhibited—shrewdly.

What for?

Many youths from Christian homes looked upon this mechanical monster and themselves became monsters—in their hearts—eager to butcher, “not only willing, but anxious to fight.”

Human slaughter has become a science. The machines are perfect and ready, all ready, for the working class to use—on the working class.

Section two: The silent destroyer—disease.

The barking rifle, the snarling Gatling gun, and the booming cannon—these have also on the battlefield a foul and powerful confederate, Disease. Disease joins in to poison the blood the guns do not spill. On this important matter the reader will appreciate the expert testimony here offered.

“In every great campaign,” says L. L. Seaman,^[94] “an army faces two enemies: First, the armed force of the opposing foe with his various machines for human destruction, met at intervals in open battles; and, second, the hidden foe, always lurking in every camp, the spectre that gathers its victims while the soldier slumbers in the barracks or bivouacs, the greater silent foe—disease. Of these enemies, the history of warfare for centuries shows that in extended campaigns, the first or open enemy kills twenty per cent. of the total mortality; while the second, or silent, enemy kills eighty per cent. In other words, out of every hundred men who fall in war, twenty die from casualties of battle, while eighty perish from disease.... It is in these conditions that we find the true hell of war.... Health alone, however, is no guarantee against the insidious attacks of the silent foe that lingers in every camp and bivouac. It is this foe, as the records of war for the past two hundred years have proved, that is responsible for four times as many deaths as the guns of the enemy, to say nothing of the vast number temporarily invalided or discharged as unfit for duty.... In the Russo-Turkish war, the deaths from the battle casualties were 20,000, while those from disease were 80,000. In our great Civil conflict... 400,000 were sacrificed to disease to 100,000 from battle casualties. In a recent campaign of the French in Madagascar 14,000 were sent to the front, of whom 29 were killed in action, and over 7,000 perished from preventable diseases. In the Boer War in South Africa the English losses were ten times greater from disease than from the bullets of the enemy. In our recent war with Spain fourteen lives were needlessly sacrificed to ignorance and incompetency for every man who died on the firing line or from results of wounds.

“In our Spanish Army we had:

“The remainder were mustered out, most of them, in shrunken and shriveled condition which the reader probably remembers. Our Army of Invasion numbered 20,000; in 1908 there were 24,000 pensioners; of these 24,000, over 19,000 are invalids and survivors of the war; and there are over 18,000 claims pending.”

Here is Theodore Roosevelt’s testimony:^[95]

“Our army [in Cuba] included the great majority of the regulars, and was, therefore, the flower of the American force.... Every officer other than myself except one was down with sickness at one time or another.... Very few of the men indeed retained their strength and energy... there were less than fifty per cent. who were fit for any kind of work.”

Disease as a destroyer appears in the data furnished by C. Goltz, a few lines of which interesting facts run thus:^[96]

“It is horrible to see trains packed full with sick soldiers sent away from the army.... The loss from sickness is almost incredible, and one example is sufficient to prove that these losses may put all success at stake. The sanitary conditions of the German army in France in 1870 was very favorable; there were no dangerous infectious diseases. Nevertheless, 400,000 men were entered at the hospitals during the campaign, in addition to those dangerously wounded.”

Anitchkow thus testifies:^[97]

“In such a rich country as France, and in such a splendid climate, the army lost four times more from disease than from battles. [Franco-Prussian War, 1870–71.] It is evident that the force of modern arms... presents less danger than infectious diseases and other sicknesses inseparable from the rough life of large camps.”^[98]

An anonymous author, quoted on a preceding page, calls attention^[99] to a matter of great importance in this connection, namely, the decreasing opportunity to carry the wounded off the battlefield and the consequent increasing terrors for the men who lie torn, feverish and unattended on the field lighted at night with searchlights and raked with machine guns, not only during the day, but also at night, making prompt rescue and surgical attention impossible. He writes:

“One of the most cruel features in future battles will be the contrast between the great improvement in medical service, and the increasing difficulty, despite the Red Cross, of giving aid to the wounded.... His conclusion [the conclusions of Dr. Bardeleben, who was Surgeon-General of the Prussian Army during the Franco-Prussian War] was that the whole system of carrying away the wounded on litters during the battle must be abandoned as altogether impracticable. This I believe has proved to be generally true. And now battles last a week or ten days! Something, of course, can be done under cover of the night—though the custom of fighting at night prevails more and more.... It is probable that, in spite of all improvements in medicine and ambulance, the sufferings of the wounded in the great battles in Manchuria and at the siege of Port Arthur have been as great as, if not greater than, those of any war of recent times.”

Here it is to be emphasized by the young man who is thinking of joining the army that in spite of the loud outcry against the poor fellows of our army in the Cuban war in the way of criminally inefficient medical service, our great and extremely patriotic statesmen who love the common soldiers so dearly have in the twelve years since the war made no adequate preparation to prevent another such outrage. Let the following stand as evidence of this statement:^[100]

“Under the existing organization it would be impossible to prevent a breakdown of the Medical Department in case of a war involving the mobilization of the volunteer forces, nor would it be possible to spare the necessary Regular medical officers to apply in those voluntary forces the modern sanitary measures so vital to the health and efficiency of the troops, without which unnecessary suffering is produced and disaster is invited.”

Thus also the New York Times:^[101]

“The admission rate into the hospitals for the American Army is [now in the time of peace] 1,250 per 1,000 each year. The British Annual notes that this enormous rate is well above that for the French, German and Austrian armies, while the hospital lists for the British Army show a rate of but 324 per thousand.”

However, all this, so far as personal danger is concerned, is of small importance to the leading citizens, because they—these leaders—will never lead or be led to war. They have nothing to fear from hissing bullet, burning fever, and the death-grip of devouring diseases in war. The plain, cheap wage-slave, the industrial draft-horses, the common men forced to keep books for a poor little salary, the fifteen-dollar-a-week clerks, the blistered miners, the tanned railroad men, the grease-stained machinists, the soil-stained farm toilers, these, all these and many others must learn one thing distinctly, and that thing is this: Modern human butchering machinery has been so highly developed, and disease in war is so hideous, that “our best citizens,” “our very best people,” “our most successful men,” politely (and intelligently) decline all “glorious opportunities” to have their smooth fat bodies exposed to the steel-belching machines, or have their health ruined on the battlefield and in the “dead-house” called a military hospital. The common earth must not drink up their rich aristocratic blood; no rough army surgeon shall carve and slice and saw the “leading citizens” and carelessly toss their severed arms and legs into a bloody heap of flesh as a butcher tosses scraps and trimmings from steaks and chops from his cutting block. Why, certainly not. It should be remembered that such people as bankers, big manufacturers, mine-owners, Senators, Congressmen, great editors and the like, do not have much physical exercise and at the same time they eat daintier food. They are not strong in muscle, except for golf, horseback riding, swimming, hunting trips, mountain climbing. They are softer in flesh than the wage-earner. They belong to the “very best families,” and hence their flesh is finer, their “blue” blood is richer and more sacred than the wage-earner’s cheap red ooze. They are the social thoroughbreds, and the thoroughbreds believe that the thoroughbreds should be kept well out of danger, while just the common social draft-horses are rushed to the front where the modern butchering machinery is ready to mow down men by the thousands and befouling disease is ready to rot the unspilt blood.

My working class brothers, mark it well: In the gilded, palatial homes of the industrial masters, in their club houses, in their elegant business offices, in the legislative halls where “statesmen” meet,—there the so-called best people, the still-fed, stall-fed snobs and Caesars of society never for one moment consider the matter of going themselves to the front, never for an instant plan to go themselves into the cyclones of lead and steel or into the death-grasp of disease in war.

Never!

To them the idea is so—well, so unkind—also ridiculous.

Their minds are made up.

They will not go.

But you, you brothers of the working class, you who toil on and on for cheap clothing, cheap shelter and cheap food—you whose very lives are bought and sold on the installment plan, for wages day by day—you who are forced to become the socially despised human oxen—you—you will be forced to the front, blinded with flattery and confused with gay-colored flags and booming drums—you will virtually be forced to cut your own throats—forced to blow out your own brains and blood with these modern steel destroyers, and forced to expose your lives to the grim curse, Disease. You will groan and scream and slowly rot and die in a dingy hospital tent or shed far from those you love—laughed at (secretly) by the prominent people who have already made up their minds not to go to war.

How long, O brothers of the working class, how long can you be seduced to slay yourselves?

Leading citizens will bring about and brag about the wars.

But you, my brothers, will fight the wars.

Grim Disease waits ready to give you her slimy embrace.

The cold steel machines are ready—ready for heated men.

Keep cool.

Beware of the “war fever.”

Notice carefully:—Your wealthy employers are not enlisting for the firing line. They are immune from the fool’s fever.

Wait a little before you enlist. Think it over—till week after next.

You are safe—(just think of it)—absolutely safe from death in the next war—if you can keep off the firing line till the “prominent gentlemen” of your community have been on the firing-line for thirty days.

Once again, brother, admit this thought to your brain:—The working class must be the protectors of their own class—always.^[102]

Section three: Peaceful slaughter—in industry.

Surely it is bad enough to have the workingmen slaughtered while on the battlefield where each is armed and has his heart full of stupid hate for his fellow workingman of some other country. But it is outrageous that men, women, and little children should be killed and wounded by the hundreds of thousands every year in our own country while they are engaged in the useful, peaceful pursuits of industry. Let us briefly consider this matter.

The owner of a chattel-slave worker is careful to PROTECT the chattel-slave from accident, from sickness and from death. The slave-owner buys the slave, buys his whole life, at one purchase; and he is interested, therefore, in having the slave alive and well and sound as long as possible in order to get out of the slave as much labor-power as possible.

But the capitalist employer of the WAGE-slave worker does not buy the wage-earner for life; he buys the wage-earner, the wage-slave, IN SECTIONS; that is, for a month, or a week or a day at a time—eight or ten hours’ labor-power per day. Thus there is no risk for the capitalist if the wage-earner falls sick and dies; he is not responsible for the wage-earner’s health. If the grinding toil ages or sickens the wage-earner it is nothing to the employer of the wage-slaves. There are plenty more wage-slaves eager to sell their labor-power if some get sick or wounded, or die.

Of course it costs the employer, it is expensive to him, it reduces the precious surplus,—it cuts down the profits on the labor-power he buys for wages—to ventilate his factory perfectly, to keep it clean of dust, foul odors and poisonous gases, to arrange safeguards about dangerous machinery in order to protect the wage-earners against accident and sickness. Railway companies, for example, are very slow to provide all possible safeguards to protect employees—simply because it is expensive, cuts down profits, reduces the surplus value. Human life, however, is very cheap under the wage-system. Of course a safety device, a ventilator, might save a human arm or a human life—of a wage-earner; but the life-saving arrangement costs quite a bit of money. A new human arm, another human life (another worker) can easily be found to take the place of the lost arm or the destroyed life—and without extra expense to the capitalist employer. There are plenty of wage-slaves waiting ’round anxious to be hired, and thus a WAGE-slave limb or life can be replaced as easily as a wooden plug or a broken wheel in a machine, and with no such loss as there would be if his workers were CHATTEL-slaves. Thus the wage-slave plan is cheaper—more profitable—and surely more convenient.

You can see that—can’t you?

Of course “it is cruel”—there is no sentiment in such a procedure. But that does not matter, under capitalism: “Business is business”—and “there is no sentiment in business,” we are assured of that by leading Christian business men.

Hence everywhere there is vicious neglect by the capitalist employers in the matter of protecting the health, limb and life of the WAGE-workers, the WAGE-slaves. The wage-system is in this respect far more cruel and murderous than the chattel-slave system. Of course it seems impossible that capitalism is more inhumanly scornful of human life than was chattel slavery. But here following is some evidence to show how the greed for profits under the wage-system results in the slaughter of men, women and children—far worse than under the chattel-slave system, even far heavier slaughter than in actual war, real war in which even wholesale butchery with sword, rifle and cannon means magnificent success.

“It is the common consensus of opinion,” says The New York Independent,^[103] “among investigators that industrial casualties in this nation number more than 500,000 yearly. Dr. Josiah Strong estimates the number at 564,000. As there are 525,600 minutes in a year, it may readily be seen that every minute (day and night) our industrial system sends to the grave-yard or to the hospital a human being, the victim of some accident inseparable from his toil. We cry out against the horrors of war.... But the ravages... of Industrial warfare are far greater than those of armed conflict. The number of killed or mortally wounded (including deaths from accidents, suicides and murders, but excluding deaths from disease) in the Philippine War from February 4, 1899, to April 30, 1902, was 1,573. These fatal casualties were spread over a period of three years and three months. But one coal mine alone in one year furnished a mortality more than 38 per cent. in excess of this.

“The Japanese war is commonly looked upon as the bloodiest of modern wars. According to the official statement of the Japanese Government, 46,180 Japanese were killed, and 10,970 died of wounds. Our industrial war shows a greater mortality year by year.

“But we are all of us more familiar with the Civil War, and we know what frightful devastation it caused in households North and South. It was, however, but a tame conflict compared with that which rages today, and which we call ‘peace.’ The slaughter of its greatest battles are thrown in the shade by the slaughter which particular industries inflict today. Ask any schoolboy to name three of the bloodiest battles of that war, and he will probably name Gettysburg, Chancellorsville and Chickamauga. The loss on both sides was:

“But our railroads, state and interstate, and our trolleys in one year equal this record in the number of killings and double it in the number of woundings....

“But whose interest is it that the lives of the workers shall be ... guarded? The employer class has no material interest in the matter. The worker is ‘free,’ legally, to refuse to work under dangerous conditions. If, economically, he must accept work under these conditions [or starve], that is another matter.”

Another witness^[104] sets forth the murderous carelessness of the lives of the workers in modern industry thus:

“In Allegheny County, Pa., including Pittsburgh, 17,700 persons were killed or injured last year in the mills and on the railroads or in some of the workshops of that interesting Inferno. This number has been recorded and reported, and there were, of course, others whose deaths or injuries were not reported.... Life and limb are needlessly sacrificed—hundreds of thousands of lives every decade. This is one of the penalties that we pay for quick industrial success.”

“Quick industrial success” is good, a fine phrase indeed—in the mining industry, for example, in which in the United States from 1889 to 1909 over 30,000 men were killed.^[105] If a war were on in the Philippines and 1500 of our men were being slaughtered every year the generals and captains in charge of our forces would be regarded as failures. Yet the captains of industry, in the capitalist administration of the mining industry alone, in the United States sacrifice more than 1500 brave men of the great industrial army every year.

That the modern industry, inspired by insane lust for profits for part of the people rather than by welfare for all the people—that this modern industry is far more deadly than real war on a large scale—this seems impossible. Yet it is not at all an impossibility; it is reality; it is experience; it is fact; it is the savagery of capitalist civilization.

All the profit-mongers’ proud and stupid boasting of the noble triumphs of capitalist “philanthropy” can not hush the loud-shouting fact that the sickle of death cuts down the toilers far more rapidly while peacefully on duty in the industries than it slashes down in time of war on the firing-line and in the military hospital—far more than the rifle, sword, bayonet, and disease combined.

This is true, horrible and important. And because it is true, horrible and important, all doubt concerning the matter should, as far as possible, be dispelled. And, therefore, still more evidence is here offered to make the matter clear.

The eminent publicist, Dr. Josiah Strong, testifies:^[106]

“We might carry on a half dozen Philippine wars for three-quarters of a century with no larger number of total casualties than take place yearly in our peaceful industries.

“Taking the lowest of our three estimates of industrial accidents, the total number of casualties suffered by our industrial army in one year is equal to the average annual casualties of our Civil War, plus those of the Philippine War, plus those of the Russian-Japanese War.

“Think of carrying on three such wars at the same time, world without end.”

Losses from sickness in war and from sickness contracted in industry are, it should be remembered, not included in Dr. Strong’s calculations.

President Roosevelt in his Annual Message of 1907 bluntly stated the facts as follows:

“Industry in the United States now exacts... a far heavier toll of death than all of our wars put together.... The number of deaths in battle in all the foreign wars put together for the last century and a quarter, aggregate considerably less than one year’s death record for our industries.”

It is inevitable that this slaughter of the toilers both in industry and in war will work rapidly and disastrously against the general blood-vigor of society. Serious and conservative students of the blood-letting and blood-weakening tendencies of capitalistic society are beginning to sound the alarm. The startlingly visible results in British society serve as excellent illustrative material. For more than two hundred years vast numbers of the soundest, strongest British workingmen have been slaughtered or weakened in war; and for more than a hundred years (the era of intense machine production) the British workingmen, women, and children have been cruelly overworked, underfed and ill-clad in the struggle for existence—in the industrial civil war called capitalism. And here are some of the results:

“In Manchester,” says Thomas Burke,^[107] “out of 12,000 would-be recruits [for the South African War], 8,000 were rejected as virtually invalids, and only 1,200 could be regarded as fit in all respects.... General Sir Frederick Maurice declared that, according to the best evidence he could obtain, it was the fact that for many years out of every five recruits only two were found to be physically fit after two years’ service.... It was, indeed, a startling fact that 60 per cent. of the men offering themselves for active service were physically unfit.”

Thus the well-known preacher and lecturer, Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, of Brooklyn, New York:^[108]

“Many forms of public charity, from a scientific viewpoint, seem a curse, while wars and many industries seem the enemies of the blood of the nation.... The national physique has suffered an incalculable loss. In one factory town [in England] the military commission, examining young men for the South African War, rejected nineteen out of twenty, because of some defect in the eyes or lungs or legs.”

It is to be remembered that many thousands of men who report for examination as candidates for military service are so evidently defective that no formal examination is necessary for their prompt rejection. It is also important to consider the fact that there are many thousands of men who would gladly join the army, but make no application, knowing well, in advance, that they would be rejected as unfit. Thus the statistics showing that a large per cent. of those reporting to the military department as candidates for the service are “rejected on examination,” even these statistics do not fully reveal the unfortunate condition of affairs. In ten of the largest cities of England and Scotland in the year ending September 30, 1907, there were 34,808 applicants for admission to the army. Forty-seven per cent. of these applicants were rejected as physically unfit.^[109] Of course, the percentage of rejections would have been far heavier if all had applied who would have been glad to join the army.

The next generation of English working-class people will probably be far more physically defective than the present generation.

In Westham public school (London) it was recently found:

“... That 87 per cent. of the infants and 70 per cent. of the older children were below the normal physique. These were all children of the dockers.

“Neglecting the kindly and assuageable problem of rural poverty, we seem driven to the conclusion that some seven and a half millions of people are at the present moment in England living below the poverty line—a problem which if only definitely realized in its squalid immensity is surely enough to stagger humanity.”^[110]

In England, because of the physical decline of the working class, the Government has so much difficulty in finding a sufficient number of sound men to fill the ranks that it has been necessary, since the Battle of Waterloo, to repeatedly lower the physical requirements for enlistment.

Thus do our brothers and sisters of the working class decay—driven to death—in the mills and mines and other industries. And in many parts of the world the fleshless skulls of the toilers slaughtered on the battlefield stare and grin at the present generation of workers decaying, dying in the capitalist industrial warfare. The president of Stanford University, Dr. David Starr Jordan, writes:^[111]

“It is claimed on authority... that the French soldier of today is nearly two inches shorter than the soldier of a century ago.... There [in Novara, Italy] the farmers have ploughed up skulls of men till they have piled up a pyramid ten to twelve feet high.... These were the skulls of the young men of Savoy, Sardinia, and Austria,—men of eighteen to thirty-five, without physical blemish so far as may be.... You know the color that we call magenta, the hue of the blood that flowed out over the olive trees.... Go over Italy as you will, there is scarcely a spot not crimsoned with the blood of France, scarcely a railway station without its pile of French skulls. You can trace them across to Egypt, to the foot of the Pyramids. You will find them in Germany, at Jena and Leipzig, at LÜtzen and Bautzen and Austerlitz. You will find them in Russia, at Moskow; in Belgium, at Waterloo. ‘A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man,’ said Napoleon; and with the rest are the skulls of boys... ‘born to be food for powder,’ was the grim epigram of the day.”

This vast crime, this phase of hell for the working class, is well stated by J. H. Rose:^[112]

“Amidst the ever deepening misery they [Napoleon’s army] struggled on, until of the 600,000 who had proudly crossed the Niemen for the conquest of Russia, only 20,000 famished, frost-bitten, unarmed spectres staggered [back] across the bridge of Lorno in the middle of December.... Despite the loss of the most splendid army ever marshalled by man, Napoleon... strained every effort to call the youth of the empire to arms.... The mighty swirl of the Moskow campaign sucked in 150,000 lads under twenty YEARS OF AGE INTO THE VORTEX.... The peasants gave up their sons as food for cannon.... In less than half a year after the loss of half a million men a new army nearly as large was marshalled.... But the majority were young.... Soldiers were wanting, youths were dragged forth.”

President Jordan, quoting Mr. Otto Seek, said:^[113]

“Napoleon in a series of years seized all the youth of high stature and left them scattered over many battlefields, so that the French people who followed them are mostly men of smaller stature. More than once in France since Napoleon’s time has the [physical] limit been lowered.”

The ancient Romans, a large robust people, spilt so much of the best blood of the best men in their “glorious” wars that their modern descendants, the Italians, are conspicuously inferior, physically, to their ancient ancestors; comparatively they are stunted. The “glorious” victories of Caesar alone cost more than a million picked men on the battlefield.^[114]

These vast, incalculable wrongs thrust into the lives of the working class—will they ever be righted?

Day dawns even now.

The lust for blood and profits will yet be cheated of its victories and victims—in the hastening future.

Our working class brothers in Europe are already rousing and shaking off the cruel spell of the gilt-braided butchers and silk-hatted capitalist statesmen and industrial Neros; the toilers in Europe are learning to seize the powers of government in self-defense,—quietly and legally, of course, but—DEFIANTLY.^[115]

We—driven, robbed and despised in the factory; betrayed, buncoed and slaughtered on the battlefield; voiceless in the control of industry, voiceless in the capitalist political party conventions, voiceless in the judiciary, voiceless in state and national legislatures, voiceless in the state and national executive councils, ridiculed by “high society,” scorned everywhere—we also must learn to defend ourselves. We must seize the powers of government and defend our class—everywhere.

Brothers, my American brothers, brothers of all the world,—if you have minds exercise them—for your own class; if you have pride, show it—for your class; if you have loyalty, prove it—for your class; if you have power, use it—use it in self-defense—for your class; if you can climb, why, climb, united with your class altogether—climb out of hell, the hell of capitalism.

Divided, your masters despise you.

United, your masters dread you.

Get together, brothers, and get up off your knees.

Refuse to go to hell—the hell of war.

Refuse to stay in hell—the hell of capitalist industry.

Unite! For peace and freedom—unite!

Form, toilers, form!

Organize!

A solid front on the battlefield—of industry.

A solid front on the battlefield—of politics.

A suggestion: Let each one of a hundred thousand men and women patiently and repeatedly bear light to the brain of one new man or woman each month for two years, and teach each new man to become a teacher of other men and women. Get some good book, a book that burns, a book that kindles a passion for freedom and justice; and lend that book to a new person each month till the book is worn out.^[116]

Light a lamp in your neighbor’s brain.

Strike a fire in your neighbor’s heart.

Revolutionize him.

Dare.

Today.

Society is, and always will be—as free as the majority have sense enough and pride enough to make it; or as tyrannical as the majority are meek enough to permit it to be.

Conditions always express the will or lack of will of the majority.