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82 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 83 La Vie des Mots and willfully permits the capitalist class to exploit working girls and children heartlessly and cruelly. want to see the autocratic imperialism destroyed, once and for all time, in Japan, as in Germany, for the liberation of the unhappy toiling millions. know that the armed peace that is to come over the Pacific will not bring a real, a democratic and a lasting peace to the workers of America and Japan. On the contrary, it will become the greatest menace and danger to both countries, and to the world.
Militarism built upon the backs of an unorganized working class, with the full support of an ever growing capitalism, will know neither constraint nor consideration. It can and it will sacrifice everything to satisfy its greedy thirst.
The only true solution of this menace and the avoidance of a possible conflict of the two Monroe Doctrines that of the Americans and that of the siatics on the Pacific. must be sought in the potential power and influence of the working classes of the countries concerned. As have shown, the Japanese workers are not organized, and consequently are powerless. We must look to and rely on others. But the American workers are organized, are powerful and influential. The future peace of the Pacific largely rests upon them. And we must work to that end!
Mr. Walter Lippmann, now a functionary of the American democracy, formerly a member of the Socialist Party, has a rather considerable philosophic and literary training, which is not all of the conventional order. The articles he used to write for The New Republic frequently said things that made you sense a profound insight, a refined skepticism, a willingness to stop anywhere in the course of the discussion to overhaul its fundamental definitions. And when, on one of the few rare occasions on which it was my good fortune to meet Mr. Lippmann, he expressed an opinion worthy of the linguistic criticism of Fritz Mauthner, felt that Lippmann must, indeed, be a remarkable man.
The European War had been in progress for ore than year, and Mr. Lippmann connection with The New Republic (which was founded, it will be remembered, in November, 1914) was nearly as old as the war. Already he had cast off not only his earlier Socialism, but also his later Progressiveism, and a gentle Imperialism possessed his spirit. He was for a large standing army, not for aggression in Europe (as yet. but for the guarantee of peaceful development to Central and South American inferiors, and, as far as the great world was concerned, he was for democracy for a world league to enforce peace, for universal military training. On the latter subject, his views were rather those of the late William James than of the late Clausewitz.
And here is where his delicate criticism of language comes in: Such words as universal military training, conscription, and so on, he said, are now popular shibboleths which it is impossible, or very difficult, to destroy. It behooves the journalist, therefore, to accept the use of such terms, but to inject into them a meaning which will be consonant with the progress of mankind; to permit the masses to continue applying the words the press has taught them, but to impart to the