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trade, and of course it has to be added to the price of the goods which you are trying to sell abroad, unless you take it out of your working people at home. If you do the former, the more navy you have the more you must charge your foreign customers, and any nation that has less insurance expense (less army and navy) will undersell you. If the latter, you will grind down your working people until you have made your country a vast slum, and they will then revolt and cut your throats and send your bone-built capitalist system to eternal sheol, to which it is fast on its way in any event. The Czar's peace rescript was partly a wild prayer for deliverance of the upper class robbers from the coming terror. Give us this day our daily bread and all other men's daily bread, and deliver us from the retribution which these men starved for centuries are at any moment liable to overwhelm and destroy us with. The Czar is aware that the common hinds who are bearing these armaments will bear them not much longer, and to save royal and capitalist necks he appeals to the nations:

"National culture, economic progress and the production of wealth are either paralyzed or checked in development. Moreover, in proportion as the armaments of each power increase, the less and less they fulfil the object the governments have set before themselves. The economic crisis, due in great part to the system of armament a outrance, and the continual danger which lies in this massing war material, are transforming the armed peace of our day into a crushing burden which the peoples have more and more difficulty in bearing. It appears evident that if this state of things were to be prolonged it would inevitably lead to the very cataclysm it is desired to avert, and the horrors whereof make every thinking being shudder in advance."

This is what flunky Reid's plan of policing the Pacific Ocean into an American lake will end in. But before it reaches that end it will defeat itself by the horrible burden of military insurance which it will impose on trade. On account of the For-Trade Massacre our devilish bosses are perpetrating in the East, taxes at home have been vastly raised and the common people are paying the piper. We now meet an insulting tax to help kill a fellow human being at every other purchase. We send a bullet to the Philippines when we send a telegram, a

And

telephone, a money order, an express package. Every bank-check drawn is a probable murder. This is sick business, but it doesn't begin to pay the new bills. The United States Treasury is falling behind and we shall have to have new taxes, and new national loans-to insure our trade. In many a mind not much given to high and heavenly things the blackest eye the 'new policy' ever received has just overtaken it. For the administration has had to throw out feelers for new war taxes or a new war loan. The N. Y. Tribune* informs the farmers that where the funds for the largely-increased army now going to the Philippines are to come from, is causing 'some concern' among the treasury's chief officials. it may well, since "The receipts of the government did not meet the extraordinary expenditures when the army was smaller." The revenues last year were as follows: Receipts from ordinary internal revenue taxation (roundly) $173,000,000; special war revenues $100,000,000; besides customs duties and miscellaneous receipts, in spite of which a big deficit occurred. There was a bond issue of $200,000,000, spent to whip God and Humanity into Spain, and love of territory and trade out of her. "The only source, therefore," says the sorcerous Tribune, "from which additional revenue can be derived, is from war taxes or bonds, or both." In that magical outspurt of love which is the eighth wonder of the world, Congress "authorized the issue of $100,000,000 worth of certificates of indebtedness and $400,000,000 worth of bonds," to liberate Cuba from the bloody hand of Spain. Two hundred million dollars' worth of these bonds were sold, and the other $200,000,000 worth are now needed. But for what? The bloody grip of Spain is loosed, what further need in Humanity's name? Why, to clasp on our bloody grip, and the Washington nincomposities maintain that the present war is part and elongation of the other one, and that they have a right to sell the remainder of the bonds voted solely to free Cuba, to raise the money to

*August 23.

enslave the Philippines, which never was and by God's grace never will be voted by the American people. What penalty is large enough for these Treasury looters? A dozen years in the penitentiary and the whipping-post would be the minimum. I am in favor of reviving the whipping-post for the greatest criminals, those elected fiends who cause wars for capitalists' gain.

It

During the two months of the new fiscal year the army has cost over $31,000,000, or half a million a day. The large force of troops just added will hugely increase this. And this sum is paid as insurance on American trade! It must be added to the cost of goods sold in the Orient, or added to the backs of the working masses of America. is just the beginning of the price we must pay to make the Pacific Ocean an American lake. If we charge the Philippines and China more than other nations do for our goods, we lose the trade or must persuade the Asiatics to buy our stuff with the cannon's mouth. But if foreign nations have cheaper labor they can offer to undersell us. We must then forfeit our trade and lose our insurance, and the Pacific Ocean as smug Reid's lake isn't worth one dead man; or we must resort to the cannon and fight the world to keep the Powers off of Our Pond, and then the insurance will rise to a bigger figure than all our foreign trade with the whole planet; or we must put it on to our working people, and reduce them to the foreign level, which we claim to abhor and which will certainly create the revolutionary tinder that covers Europe and brings the Czar paralysis of dismay. We have our choice. This is what we must thank the Peace Commission for bringing upon us by acting beyond our orders, and presenting us with monopolists' expansion. And Reid says, “Are we to lose all this through a mushy sentimentality, characteristic neither of practical nor of responsible people-alike unAmerican and un-Christian, since it would humiliate us by showing lack of nerve to hold what we are entitled to... ?"

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And he says: "First, hold what you are entitled to."

And he says: "Another [bugbear] is that our American workmen will be swamped under the immigration of cheap Eastern labor. But tropical labor does not immigrate to colder climates. None have ever come." Are not Chinese and Japanese tropical enough, and have they not come? "If we need a law to keep them out, we can make it." But if we cannot prevent our rulers from seizing nations without our consent, how can we compel them to make laws to keep the natives of those nations out, if they want them to come in? And what laws do millionaires customarily keep? And were not the tropical blacks brought in against all efforts of wisdom, right, and humanity? But, says Reid again, "It is a bugbear that the Filipinos would be citizens of the United States,..

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sist the crazy extension of the doctrine that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed to an extreme never imagined by the men who framed it, and never for one moment acted upon in their own practice." And finally he says, "Now, if ever, is the time... to make our Government worthy of the new and great responsibilities which the Providence of God rather than any purpose of man has imposed upon it."

CHAPTER XXII.

Grandchildren of Israel.

Besides ourselves history has known but one other absolutely chosen people, and they were the Jews. God talked as familiarly to Moses and Aaron as he does now with McKinley and Reid, and although it was a good many thousand years ago, his injunctions have hardly varied or improved their morality at all. The Lord spake unto Moses in the 31st chapter of Numbers and said, "Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites:.. And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males... And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods. And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire. And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts. And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses and Eleazar the priest,.. And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host,.. And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?.. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”

In the fortieth year of his reign and the first chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses makes a speech, rehearsing the history of God's promise, God's anger, the bigness of the bed of Og king of Bashan, the smiting of him with the

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