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UPTON SINCLAIR'S

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE: FOR A CLEAN PEACE AND THE INTERNATION

I have begun the publication of a fighting magazine for a Clean Peace and Social Reconstruction: a non-partisan, get-together organ of the coming Revolt.

The first number contains a peace program upon which all radicals may unite; also it contains a sketch of a "California louse-ranch." a bit of local color from this roof-garden of the world.

Also it contains the first instalment of a new hook, "The Profits of Religion : An Essay in Economic Interpretation." This is a study of Supernaturalism from a new point of view, as a Source of Income and a Shield to Privilege. It contains the facts, both ancient and modern, and it hews to the line.

I have put my best into the magazine, and I think I have a right to ask that every radical will send me at once a request for a free sample copy.

Tn addition, you may subscribe if you have that much faith in me. The price is ten cents per copy, one dollar a year, ten yearly subscriptions for five dollars.

UPTON SINCLAIR.

1511 Sunset Avenue, Pasadena, California.

What Every American Should Know-

The Facts

The facts about the war aims and peace terms of the warring nations are to be found in

Approaches to the

Great Settlement

By Professor EMILY G. BALCH
With an Introduction by NORMAN ANGELL

A concise account of official and non-official discussions relating to the settlement of
the war beginning with President Wilson's Peace Note of December 12,1916;
with a valuable bibliography.

Price $1.50 net; at All Book Stores
Published by

B. W. HUEBSCH, 225 Fifth Ave., New York City

An interpretation, at once scientific and eloquent, of poetry in life, and its relation to the poetry in literature.

ENJOYMENT Of POETRY

By MAX EASTMAN Editor of The Liberator

Formerly Associate in Philosophy
at Columbia University, Author of
"Child of the Amazons" and Other
Poems, etc.

$1.25 Postpaid

Offered by Charles Scribner's
Sons through The Liberator
Book Shop.

TIDE LIBERATOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

EDITOR, Max Eastman
MANAGING EDITOR, Crystal Eastman
ASSOCIATE EDITOR, Floyd Deli

Published Monthly by the

Cornelia Barns Howard Brubaker Hugo Gellert Arturo Giovannitti Charles T. Hallinan Helen Keller

Ellen La Motte Robert Minor

John Reed Boardman Robinson Louis Untermeyer Charles W. Wood

LIBERATOR PUBLISHING CO-, INC.
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New York City

Copyright, iSiS, by the Liberator Publishing Co., Inc.
34 Union Square, New York.
Application for entry as second class matter at the post office
at New York City pending.

Art Young
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$1.50 a Year. Half Yearly, 75 cents. Foreign, $2.00.

Rates on Bundle Orders and to Newsdealers on Application.

In The Next Issue

Morris `Hillquit

Will write on the International Situation.

John Reed

Will continue his stories of the Bolsheviki and their Revolutionary Achievements, in which he took part.

Alexander Trachtenberg,

Editor of The American Labor Year Book,

Will begin a new department: A CALENDAR OF SOCIAL REVOLU-

TIONARY PROGRESS IN A.LL COUNTRIES.

James Weldon Johnson, A Negro poet,

Will write on What the Negro is Doing for His Own Freedom.

THE LIBERATOR

Vol. 1, No. 2 April, 1918

Editorials

WE received from Mrs. William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, a subscription to THE LIBERATOR with these words, "We are glad to see the old name revived in such a good cause."

Her message adds something that was needed to our courage, for it was with the diffidence of a deep admiration that we adopted the name of this magazine. Garrison's Liberator was the greatest paper in the history of the United States ; and it was great not only because it concentrated a prophetic sacred fire against the sin of chattel slavery, but because it sounded the music of the love of utter liberty for all. Garrison was r1ot very much Iike us, I think-not pagan, never idle-hearted, not determined, whatever he should achieve, to have humane pleasure while achieving it. He was a consecrated Christian spirit. To be imprisoned, and to be hounded, and wounded, and dragged through the streets of his city with a rope round his neck, a criminal agitator who dared to say that the Constitution of the United States was "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," was not a special incident hut almost a general symbol of his life. Morning and evening and noon and night he burned his energy for freedom. When all the nation's middle-class idealists were condemning human slavery but saying, as they will eternally say, "We must go slow -it is not yet time," he said, "The time is now." To deplore an evil, yet lay the responsibility for its existence upon the dead and for its removal upon the unborn, was as intolerable to him as filth to fire. He was quenched for a while; he was imprisoned in Baltimore. He had "libelled" a firm that shipped slaves to New Orleans, denouncing their act as "domestic piracy," and promising to cover them with "thick infamy." The paper in which he expressed his opinion was destroyed. When he was liberated he marched into the heart of the high, capitalistic, slave-defending territory, New England, penniless but resourceful as brave, and with his own hands and eyes set up and published those first fighting issues of the paper that freed the slaves.

"I am in earnest-I will not equivocate-I will not excuse-I will not retreat a single inch-I will be heard." That was his address to the public. It was the first of January 1831. In thirty-five years the slaves were free, the Civil War was ended, and THE LIBERATOR suspended publication because its fiery course was burned through to the goal. There is no vivider story in the history of public print. There is no victor that excelled him. And yet he was greater than his victory, he was larger of heart and brain than any fanatic possessed by a single wish. The width and generosity of his thought, and his seeking love, are told and told with clear poignancy for us in this day of nar-

rowed and egotistic emotion-in the motto that opened the pages of THE LIBERATOR,

"Our Country is the World-Our Countrymen are Mankind."

The Supreme Atrocity

`WILE our soldiers go over the sea to give their lives

WHILE

crusade against the atrocities of Prussianism in Europe, a propaganda creeps under the ground among the Huns of our southern and middle-western states in favor of torturing with white hot irons as a substitute for the lynching and burning of negroes. It bore fruit of action in Estill Springs, Tennessee, on February 12th, when a mob of one thousand people, incited by the oration of a woman, chained Jim Mcllherron to a tree, branded and mutilated his body until he confessed to a murder, and then burned him to death.

Two hundred and twenty-two negroes have been lynched or murdered by mobs in the United States in the past year. That is an average of more than one every two days. Only eleven of these have been murdered for alleged rape and attempted rape ; five for alleged murder. Twenty-eight have been lynched for crimes that in case of conviction by a jury would not entail the death penalty.

If these things happened in one city, it would, be a white man's terror, comparable to the worst days of the French Revolution, and exceeding the most extreme re-ports of Germany's invasion of Belgium. Such horrors, equalled only by the Turks' massacres in Armenia, are a part of the routine history of our country. It is necessary that we know this. It is necessary that we see this happen. The torturing at Estill Springs has not been investigated, but it followed an example set by the citizens of Dyersbtirg, Tennessee, in December, and upon that there is an authentic report.

"The Negro was seated on the ground and a buggy-'axle driven into the ground between his legs. His feet were chained together with logging chains, and he was tied with wire. A fire was built. Pokers and flat-irons were procured and heated in the fire. It was thirty minutes before they were red-hot.

"Reports of the torturing, which have been generally accepted and have not been contradicted, are that the Negro's clothes and skin were ripped from his body simultaneously with a knife. His self-appointed executors burned his eye-balls with red-hot irons. When he opened his mouth to cry for mercy a red-hot poker was rammed down his gullet. In the same way he was robbed of his sexual organs. Red hot irons-were placed on his feet, back, and body, until a hideous stench of burning human flesh filled the Sabbath air of Dyersburg.

"Thousands of people witnessed this scene. They had to be pushed back from the stake to which the Negro was

6 THE L[BERATOR

chained. Roof-tops, second-story windows, and porch-tops were filled with spectators. Children were lifted to shoulders, that they might behold the agony of the victim.

"A little distance away in the public square, the best citizens of the county supported the burning and torturing with their presence.

"Public opinion in Dyersburg and Dyer County seems to be divided into two groups. One group considers that the Negro got what he deserved. The other group feels that he should have had a `decent lynching'."*

We must see this happen, because no one else will see it. No one will allow himself to see it, save only those mobs that drink up the death and agony. Barely seventy years ago the sons and brothers that would be ours. marched away to give their blood as now for liberty and the rights of the oppressed; and is this the liberty they gave it for-to see these oppressed _hunted through the country like rats, and without court or jury or the shadow of any memory of law, chained' down and,tortured to confession and death? Is this their victory-that the voice of our national government in the capitol of Lincoln, while we are pouring out the ancient sacrifice again upon the fields of war, remains silent though the soul of everything we fight for, justice, liberty, legality, every defense or form of right established of man since savagery, is ravaged within a day's march of Washington?

What Kind of Peace?

PEACE has its evils no less than war. And those who have not merely suspended until the war's end a daily bath of Christian optimism, are poising their minds and their emotions now to see who the powers are that are moving toward peace, and what kind of peace they will bring. H. G. Wells, in an article in the New Republic of February 9-the best he has ever written-has a word on this subject:

"Our Tories." he says, "blundered into this great war, not seeing whither it would take them. In particular it is manifest now by a hundred signs that they dread the fall of monarchy in Germany and Austria. Far rather would they make the most abject surrender to the Kaiser than deal with a renascent republican Germany. The recent letter of Lord Lansdowne, urging a peace with German imperialism, was but a feeler from the pacifist side of this most un-English and unhappily most influential section of our public life. Lord Lansdowne's letter was the Ietter of a peer who fears revolution more than national dishonor."

Wells does not think, however, that this pacifist wing of the Tories is much to be feared. "It is the ,truculent wing," he says, "of this same anti-democratic movement that is far more active. While our sons suffer and die for their comforts and conceit, these people scheme to prevent any communication between the republican and socialist classes in Germany and the Allied population. At any cost this class of pampered and privileged traitors intend to have peace while the Kaiser is still on his throne. If not, they face a new world-in which their part will be small indeed. And with the utmost ingenuity they

°Report of the Nat'l Assn for Advancement of Colored People.

maintain .1 dangerous vagueness about the Allied peace terms, with the sole object of preventing a revolutionary movement in Germany. . . .

It is not of final importance whether the pacifist or military group of these men just now is predominant. If, as Wells says, the anti-democratic forces have had their kind of war, they will certainly try to have their kind of peace. It will be an imperial, nationalistic and capitalistic peace, a peace with wars already in its womb. It will matter little to the future of the world whether Germany plays a proud or humbled part in patching up such a peace. And the citizens of the world must beware of those men who seek it in all countries-in England as in Germany, the United States as England.

We must beware of the powers who will try to convert the "World's Peace" into a special little arrangement with English Tories for the benefit of American imperialism. A sufficient slogan for that purpose will be "The Rights of Small Nations in Central America, ,and The Internationalization of the Panama Canal."

English Admiration

TIIE English have an idea that we are entierly free from Tory imperialist forces. "In America," says Professor Gilbert Murray, "the problem .is much simpler than over here, because you have no imperialist party, no strong and ingrained habit of annexation to battle with; but we have, and most unfortunately we have it in power both in the War Cabinet and in the London press, to say nothing of that curious congress 'of selected Generals and' casual politicians which issues manifestoes from Versailles."

An epidemic of genuine admiration for us is the strangest thing that has struck England since 1914. Sick and suspicious of the amount of "moral idealism" required to cover up the complex European motivation of this war, her people have turned to us instinctively for a breath of pure air. They have idealized us. They look over to our shores somewhat as they did in the days of Sir Walter Raleigh for a new world. Lloyd George calls us "the greatest democray in existence." There are some incidents which might dampen their enthusiasm a little; it is ascertainable in a glance at the chief metropolitan newspapers, for instance, that the anti-democratic, imperial and nationalistic forces of America are in full control of the press.

They are not, however, in full control of the government. And therefore there is truth in the opinion. that America's war-policy represents a disinterested idealism for the world. The British government has been slowly coerced by the British Labor Party into a kind of blustering silence which implies half consent to an attempt at an internationalistic peace. But President Wilson has taken the lead even from the British Labor Party in this matter, and in his four-teen articles of January 9, and his message of February tt softening the specific articles and strengthening the world-principles, he has, in my opinion, laid down a challenge to British as well as American imperialists.

April. 1918 7

"This class of pampered and privileged traitors intends to have peace while the Kaiser is still on his throne . . . They maintain a dangerous vagueness about the Allied peace terms, with the sole object of preventing a revolutionary movement in Germany."-H. G. Wells.

A Working-Class Peace

IT is not only a World Peace that we want-not only a peace that shall be all-sided and permanent from the standpoint of nations. We want a working-class peace-a peace in the settlement of which labor in every country shall play so strong a part that that peace will mean freedom. This is the significance of the conference of radicals and socialists and labor leaders in New York on February 16th, at which James H. Maurer, was elected to carry a message of solidarity to similar bodies in Europe. It was a notice to Samuel Gompers that if official American Labor is content to follow his clucking and sit under his wings, unofficial American

labor is not. The program adopted was distinguished by an undiplomatic directness of utterance that gives hope of action, and by several concrete proposals not included in the President's program, nor that of the British Labor Party. We quote it here:

A CONSTRUCTIVE WORLD PROGRAM FOR
DEMOCRACY AND PEACE

1. Economic Freedom

Economic opportunities should be open to all and on equal terms.

a. All international waterways should be open at all times, under international guarantee.

8 THE LIBERATOAt

Free Trade should prevail.
The ownership and control of all resources, public utilities, financial agencies and other economic opportunities should be vested in the people and their use open to all nations upon equal terms.
No nation should be responsible, for the investments of its citizens in any other country,
No restriction should be placed upon voluntary migration.
Political Liberty

The right of self-determination should be guaranteed to all peoples including those in dependencies and colonies.

Civil Liberty

'Civil Liberty including freedom of conscience, of speech, of the press, of language, of assemblage and of petition should be absolute in time of peace or war.

Disarmament
All standing armies should be disbanded and all existing navies abolished.
Every form of military training and military service should be abandoned.
The production of all forms of munitions or instruments of war should be forbidden either in private factories or. public establishments.

Bolshevik Problems

LENINE seems to be one of those reasoners in whom act follows conclusion with the same inevitability that conclusion follows premise. He believes that the class-struggle between laborers and the owners of machinery and land is absolute, and must issue in the expropriation of the owners, before the world can be free or democratic. This being true he concludes that the "liberal" compromisers, the moderates, the menshevik socialists, who desire at the moment of victory to obscure and di-lute the class-struggle for the sake of more trivial and immediate benefits, are the worst enemies of freedom and democracy. Therefore, in a quite Iogical and impersonal manner he arrests them, suspends their publications, and puts them in jail. He assumes that their hearts are right, and that when he has done what he has to do, they will be with him, so he assures them that "such measures are only temporary and when the acuteness of the situation is past all the persons arrested will be re-leased." At present, however, their lack of Marxian understanding makes the goodness of their hearts a danger to liberty, and they must go.

According to the press, he has in prison at the present time both Plekhanov, who is the father of Socialism in Russia, the original theoretician and editor-teacher from whom for forty years they have all been learning the basic principles upon which they act, and "Babushka" Breshkovskaya, the "grandmother of the revolution," and one of the few famous women of the world. I doubt if any other biography of these times will seem so picturesque and significant, to those who look back, as hers. All her life under the Czar she has been in jail for liberty,

or escaping for liberty, or agitating for liberty and going back again to jail. A woman, and a fighter-full of love and rebellion and great thoughts-she was for years a symbol to the American middle-class idealist of the whole revolutionary movement in Russia. Now she is in jail again-for liberty ! And the American idealist finds it difficult to readjust his thoughts, and his admirations, to the novelty of that. She is in jail because her dream of liberty is now the old dream-the political and not the industrial, the evangelical ideal and not the economic force that will make it real. At least so it seems to me. There is a risk in every temporary violation of personal liberty ; but in the cause of ultimate liberty for all, this risk must be taken.

If "Babushka" feels hopeless of any reorganization under Lenine, hopeless of peace and food and productive labor for her people, her days are dark indeed; but if she can find in this strong, unscrupulously idealistic leader-ship any hope of those things-then I can not believe she is heart-broken to see her revolution go so far in victory that she herself becomes a reactionary. For my part, i f only I could be sure that hunger, and terror, and intervention of foreigners, and the uncanny behavior of money, will not be victorious over the spirit of the "Re-public of Soviets," I would be able to smile a good deal at the poignant incident of her imprisonment.*

There is of course a more difficult question before Le-nine than this question of persons and moral principles. It is the old question that disturbs every picture of the social revolution painted on air by the city soap-boxerthe question, "Where does the farmer come into the class struggle ?" Russia is not at large an industrial but a peasant country; it was only under Stolypin in 1907 that the land of the peasant villages was taken out of common ownership and allowed to run the course of private property. Much of this land is not unjustly distributed, and some of the peasants themselves own the acres that they work. They are not hired men ; they are not "proletarians." They have no one to "expropriate" but themselves. Peasants of this character, who are neither proletarians nor capitalists, though not numerous, are symbolic, perhaps, of an average attitude of the farmer towards the class struggle. They are the problem for the Bolsheviki, in Russia, just as they are the problem for the Socialist in America.

Now the moderate, utopian, procrastinating kind of "socialism" preached by Babushka and Kerenski, and others of the right wing of the Socialist-Revolutionists, appealed to this average farmer. There was no class struggle in it. It was willing to "get along" with capitalism, provided plenty of dreams were permitted of the restoration of the land to communal ownership. The Bolshevik idea of immediate confiscation in the interest of wage-workers, appeals directly only to hired men and to the poorest peasants-those who, although they own their land, are so much in debt that they are in practical wage dependence upon their creditors. The others must

*since this was printed I have been told by Louise Bryant, who has just come from Russia with personal news of these events, that Babushka is not under arrest and has not been. My argument is so cogent, however, that I am sure she will be if she is not careful! At any rate the story of her arrest is only an exaggeration of repressive measures that have been taken against "Socialists," and the necessity of these I have not over-emphasized.

April, 1915 9

be won, if they are won at all, by argument and by appeal to their understanding and sympathy.

It is interesting to see how wisely Lenine argues with them. Showing that the common ownership of the Iand can not be separated, as the Procrastinators would have it, from the overthrow of capitalism, he says: "The confiscation of all private ownership in land means the confiscation of hundreds of millions of bank capital, with which these lands, for the most part, are mortgaged. Is such a measure conceivable unless the revolutionary plan, by the aid of revolutionary methods, shall break down the opposition of the capitalists? Besides, we are here touching the most centralized form of capital, which is bank capital, and which is bound by a million threads with all the important centers of the capitalist system of this great nation, which can be defeated only by the equally well-organized power of the proletariat of the cities,

"The social-democratic mass movement in Russia has been going on for twenty years (if we count from the great strikes of 1896). Throughout this interval, passing through the two great revolutions, there runs a veritable red thread of Russian political history, this great question: Shall the working class lead the peasantry for-ward to socialism, or shall the liberal bourgeoisie drag them back into a conciliation with capitalism?

"The revolutionary Social-Democratic Party (Bolsheviki) has all this time been fighting to remove the peas-ants from the influence of the cadets and has offered them, in place of the utopian middle class view of Socialism, only a revolutionary-proletarian path to Socialism.

"Only the proletariat, leading on the poorest peasants (the semi-proletariat, as they are called in our program) may terminate the war with a democratic peace, may heal its wounds, and may undertake the steps toward Socialism that have become absolutely unavoidable and non-postponable. That is the clear demand of our class policy at present."

Though so clear and positive of the next step, how-ever, Lenine is not without a sense df the fluidity of evolution. IIe is willing to let time help him. He is not an extreme dogmatist.

"The peasants want to retain their small holdings and to arrive at some place of equal distribution," he says. "So be it. No sensible socialist will quarrel with a pauper peasant on this ground. If the lands are confiscated, so long as the proletarians rule in the great centers and all political power is handed over to the proletariat, the rest will take care of itself, will be a natural outcome of the `power of example; practice itself will do the teaching here. .

"The passing of political power to the proletariat, that is the whole thing. Then all the essential, fundamental, real points in the program of the 242 instructions become realities. And life will point out with what modifications this realization is to proceed. We should worry! We are not doctrinaires.

"We do not pretend that Marx or the Marxians know every detail of the road which leads to Socialism. That would be folly. We know the direction of the road, we know what class forces will lead to it, but the concrete,

practical details will appear in the experience of the mil-lions when they tackle the job."

This article, which 1 quote from The New International for February, was written by Lenine last May. But it reveals his keen understanding of the forces he now re-lies on. That the proletariat can lead the poorer peasants, as he predicted, has been confirmed by the course of events. Tchernoff, a politician of the peasants, who was chairman of the Constituent Assembly dispersed by Le-nine, has since come over to the government. Martov, a leader of the Menshivik Internationals, has come over to the government. According to information we receive through sympathetic sources, the solidarity of the exploited classes in Russia today is as complete as could be hoped by the most academic Marxian. The moderates, the reformists, are merely voices in the air-"Like Spargo's new party" ! The plain folks, the undistinguished, the workers of Russia are united in the determination to establish a socialist-syndicalist society, a republic of free labor.

Even In England

A REVOLUTIONARY disposition in Great Britain is

as startling as an accomplished revolution on the continent. And though it has to dress itself in laboriously dispassionate language, and show no color of life or wine at any cost, still it is a great, slow, rending tank of a thing, and once it gets started a great many of the honorable British institutions will go tinder like milkweed. I can not feel social revolution when I read the report of the subcommittee of the British Labor Party on reconstruction, but I can recognize it. I want to quote one paragraph of this report (published in this country by the New Republic) reminding the reader that the Labor Party is generally admitted to hold the balance of power in England, and is confidently expected by many to form the next government.

"Unlike the Conservative and Liberal parties, the Labor party insists on democracy in industry as well as in government. It demands the progressive elimination from the control of industry of the private capitalist, individual or joint-stock; and the setting free of all who work, whether by hand or by brain, for the service of the community, and of the community only. And the Labor party refuses absolutely to believe that the British people will permanently tolerate any reconstruction or perpetuation of the disorganization, waste and inefficiency involved in the abandonment of British industry to a jostling crowd of separate private employers, with their minds bent, not on the service of the community, but-by the very law of their being-only on the utmost possible profiteering. .

"What the Labor party looks to is a genuinely scientific re-organization of the nation's industry, no longer deflected by individual profiteering, on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production; the equitable sharing of the proceeds among all who participate in any capacity and only among these, and the adoption, in particular services and occupations, of those systems and methods of administration and control that may be found, in practice, best to promote the public interest."

It is safe' to predict that this British revolution will not only move with a ponderous, slow, worming motion that is not inspiring to the emotions, but also that it will

10 THE LIBERATOR

stagger a good deal, and carry a lot of old trees and rubbish along on its back. The signs of a limp are already apparent upon page 4 of this report, where in the midst of the most earth-sweeping sentences that ever rocked the lordly island, is contained an earnest declaration in favor of a national minimum wage of 30 shillings--seven dollars and fifty cents-a week!

Mediation Versus Agitation

THE President's Mediation Commission, which has smoothed down for the period of the war five labor disputes west of the Mississippi, makes a report upon the causes of "labor difficulties." The report is written with excellent clarity and literary art. It mentions the refusal of employers to deal with unions, the absence of regular "machinery" of mediation between employers and unions, a lack of mutual "understanding" between them, a feeling on the part of labor that wages ought to rise nearly as fast as the cost of living and that the eight-hour day is "an accepted national policy," autocratic acts of repression by employers, such as the Bisbee and Jerome deportations, the Everett incident, the Little hanging, and a resort by the employers to a charge of disloyalty when their employees are only demanding social' justice as the principal causes of "labor difficulties."

Thus the indictment contained in this report is against the employers almost absolutely and without qualification. The labor union principle of collective bargaining, and the eight hour day as a universal standard, are emphatically recommended to the government both for war and peace.

I suppose that no more can be asked of a "mediation" commission, no more can be recommended to a middle-class government. I can not help wondering, though, how these men feel-Felix Frankfurter, William B. Wilson, John H. Walker, and the others going through a territory that is rife with revolutionary understanding, a territory in which hundreds of agitators with as much brains and equilibrium as they have, could give them facts and figures of the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth which is dividing this country, and never even allude to it as a contributing cause of "industrial difficulties." When they recall those first paragraphs of the report of Frank Walsh's commission, which neglected to say any-thing at all about specific grievances, or about testimonies or the evidence of witnesses, and simply quoted out of the United States census the underlying facts of our capitalistic feudalism as the cause of labor's unrest, they must feel a little trivial, these commissioners of mediatIon.

They know well enough that "labor difficulties" are not c?'used by, nor cured by, the matters of their discussion. And I don't mind their keeping their knowledge in their pockets-for the purposes of the moment. But I do mind their alluding to those who-for larger purposes-choose to say what they know, as "fanatical" and "destructive" "extremists." Industrial unionism and the purpose of working-men to supplant capitalists in the control of industries and their profits, is not fanatical extremism. It is not destructive. It is the only plan in the world constructive enough to cure "labor difficulties,"

and conserve to human society the benefits of machine invention and the factory system.

Members or Not

LAST Summer, discussing some resignations from the socialist party, I said that I had enough faith in the pro-war and anti-war socialists to believe they would soon be working together along the main highway of industrial liberation. In certain cases I think my faith was ill-placed. Upper-class patriotism seems to act upon some minds a good deal as upper-class money acts., But In other cases loyalty to the underlying purpose of the class-struggle has not wavered.

Rose Pastor Stokes has gone so far as to apply for membership, or remembership, in the party.

"I left the party," she says, "because I considered dangerous the party's attitude toward America's participation in the war; but the crisis created by the St. Louis resolution is past, and the present immediate danger is an imperialistic peace which, I believe, only a unified and strengthened international Socialist movement can pre-vent."

Well, it was dangerous, as some of the members are quite well convinced. But we suspect it was heartening to the revolutionary minority in Germany, and did its part towards strengthening in all countries those who will insist upon internationalism whenever the time comes. The Socialist Party adopted "The Majority Re-port," denouncing and resisting the war, but it acted upon the "Minority Report," which accepted the war as a fact, and sought to win out of it all the progress possible. Perhaps this divorce of profession and practice, under the circumstances, was the best way to promote what we all desired-encouragement of the spirit of social revolution all over the world. At any rate the crisis begot by our reiteration of principles, is past, and as Rose Pastor sees truly, the problem of preventing imperialism in the peace terms is before us all. It is the only problem about which we can do anything just now. And if we are agreed in doing, we are agreed enough.

MAX EASTMAN.

TO WOODROW WILSON

MAN'

You are trusted of millions.

These grass-blades your smooth acres bear-

The dust-motes dancing in a slant of sun across, the silence of your book-walled-room-

The driven rain-drops of a torn, wild night-

Are not so many as the human souls that sleep

In trust of you,

Do you feel their white faith through the night?

RUTH R. PEARSON.