War—What For‪?‬

I refuse to kill your father. I refuse to slay your mother’s son. I refuse to plunge a bayonet into the breast of your sister’s brother. I refuse to slaughter your sweetheart’s lover. I refuse to murder your wife’s husband. I refuse to butcher your little child’s father. I refuse to wet the earth with blood and blind kind eyes with tears. I refuse to assassinate you and then hide my stained fists in the folds of any flag.

I refuse to be flattered into hell’s nightmare by a class of well-fed snobs, crooks and cowards who despise our class socially, rob our class economically and betray our class politically.

Will you thus pledge me and pledge all the members of our working class?

Sit down a moment, and let us talk over this matter of war. We working people have been tricked—tricked into a sort of huge steel-trap called war.

Really, the smooth “leading citizens” tried their best to flim-flam me, too. They cunningly urged me to join the militia and the army and be ready to go to war. Their voices were soft, their smiles were bland, they made war look bright, very bright. But I concluded not to train for war or go to war—at least not until the brightness of war became bright enough to attract those cunning people to war who tried to make war look bright to me. I have waited a long time. I am still waiting. Thus I have had plenty of opportunity to think it all over. And the more I think about war the more clearly I see that a bayonet is a stinger, made by the working class, sharpened by the working class, nicely polished by the working class, and then “patriotically” thrust into the working class by the working class—for the capitalist class.

The busy human bees sting themselves.

If I should enlist for service in the Department of Murder I should feel thoroughly embarrassed and ashamed of myself. It is all clear to me now. This is the way of it, brother:—

In going to war I must work like a horse and be as poor as a mouse, must be as humble as a toad, as meek as a sheep and obey like a dog; I must fight like a tiger, be as cruel as a shark, bear burdens like a mule and eat stale food like a half-starved wolf; for fifteen or twenty dollars a month I must turn against my own working class and thus make an ass and a cat’s-paw of myself; and after the war I should be socially despised and snubbed as a sucker and a cur by the same distinguished “leading citizens” who wheedled me to war and afterward gave me the horse-laugh;—and thus I should feel like a monkey and look like a plucked goose in January.