111 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 115 Current Affairs Peace With Victory Our entry into the war has worked a truly remarkable change in our conceptions of peace and war at least in those of us who stand behind the President and in the President himself.
idea of humanity. We have always said: In fighting the class struggle of the proletariat we are fighting the cause of humanity.
As speak of humanity and progress recall to you the Congress in Basel, which strove to prevent the war, and which said. The proletariat feels that at this moment it is the bearer of the future of the human race. This idea of humanity gives to the class struggle of the proletariat a higher value. Yet this idea of humanity was betrayed by the Social Patriots at the beginning of the war and cannot now be revived.
Before the first of May you may have read in the ArbeiterZeitung about this idea of humanity. But what differentiates me from other Social democrats is that upheld, at all times, the ideals that they propagated before the war.
If you wish to understand my struggle you must know that it has been my highest aim to bring my party comrades back to this program. And you will understand what a cataclysm the action of the Social democrats of Austria has been for me.
We were in the midst of preparations for an International congress. We had planned to publish in the Vienna Arbeiter Zeitung articles from delegates of all nations. And then suddenly there appeared in the Arbeiter Zeitung of August an article with the title The Day of the German Nations, an article which stood completely on acceptance of the war. We will never forget this day of the 4th of August, thus began the article. But our party leaders to day would like to forget this article, and have said to me again and again that we in Austria had no 4th of August. To this have always answered: We had no 4th of August in Austria the Sturgkh government never even asked us but we had something that is much worse, a 5th of August, the day on which that article was printed in the Arbeiter Zeitung, that harmed us far beyond the border, particularly in Italy, to where this article had been telegraphed. Thus came into constant conflict with my party and my friends.
On January 22 the President, speaking before the United States Senate, declared in the name of the American people that the peace which is to end the Great War must be a peace without victory. That speech thrilled the world, or at least America, with the nobility of its sentiment, hoping for the conclusion of this greatest of all wars without victors or vanquished and the grandeur of its conceptions of a future world peace resting not upon military power but the international organization of the world.
At least so we were assured by those who stood behind the President and some others who went into ecstasies over it. The New Republic, Wilson mouthpiece to the radicals, thus put the matter before its readers in an editorial article bearing the modestlygrandiloquent title America Speaks. It must be a peace without victory.
So long that the people of the world believe that a lasting peace can be secured by dictation rather than by negotiation, the world will be where it always has been, at the mercy of a teetering balance of power.
Peace has never been secured in Europe by that method and never will be.
Is it (the war) to go on till the Allies can dictate a peace to a prostrate enemy? Are they to take the position that no peace is possible unless they have won an absolute decision in the field? Perhaps, but in that case Europe is likely to be so embittered with its sacrifices that any larger plan of security must fail. If Europe fights on in the belief that security can be had only by victory, then the foundations of a league will be shattered. It is likely to be the old peace which never lasted because it put all its faith in military power and ignored international organization. Obviously we cannot prevent Europeans from following this theory. The matter is in their hands. But if they do follow it, if they set their hearts on that rather than