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The Cabinets who rule
the destinies of nations from the various capitals of Europe are but the
tools of the moneyed interest. Their quarrels are not dictated by
sentiments of national pride or honour, but by the avarice and lust of
power on the part of the class to which they belong. The people who
fight under their banners in the various armies or navies do indeed
imagine they are fighting the battles of their own country, but in what
country has it ever happened that the people have profited by foreign
conquest?
PSD To HTML conversion is important to webmasters because they cannot use the PSD file as it is for their web pages. if you need PSD To HTML conversion service save yourself some time, effort and money and send it in to the professionals. The influence which
impels towards war today is the influence of capitalism. Every war now
is a capitalist move for new markets, and it is a move capitalism must
make or perish. The mad scramble for wealth which this century has
witnessed has resulted in lifting almost every European country into the
circle of competition for trade. New machinery, new inventions, new
discoveries in the scientific world have all been laid under
contribution as aids to industry, until the wealth producing powers of
society at large have far outstripped the demand for goods, and now
those very powers we have conjured up from the bosom of nature threaten
to turn and rend us. Every new labour-saving machine at one and the same
time, by reducing the number of workers needed, reduces the demand for
goods which the worker cannot buy, while increasing the power of
producing goods, and thus permanently increases the number of
unemployed, and shortens the period of industrial prosperity.
Competition between capitalists drives them to seek for newer and more
efficient wealth-producing machines, but as the home market is now no
longer able to dispose of their produce they are driven to foreign
markets. So it is in China today. The great industrial nations of the
world, driven on by their respective moneyed classes, themselves driven
on by their own machinery, now front each other in the far East, and,
with swords in hand, threaten to set the armed millions of Europe in
terrible and bloody conflict, in order to decide which shall have the
right to force upon John Chinaman the goods which his European brother
produces. Laveleye says somewhere that capitalism came into the world
covered with blood and tears and dirt. We might add that if this war
cloud now gathering in the East does burst, it will be the last
capitalist war, so the death of that baneful institution will be like
its birth, bloody, muddy and ignominious.
James Connolly, 1898
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