8 THE CLASS STRUGGLE You imprisoned Louise Soumoneau in one of your jails; but have you thereby diminished the despair and the despondency of this land? You can arrest hundreds of Zimmerwaldists, after having ordered your press agents to besmirch them again and again with police suspicions; but can you return the husbands to their grieving wives? Can you restore the sons to their suffering mothers, the fathers to their children, strength and health to the sick and debilitated? Can you return, to a betrayed, exsanguinated people, the trust in those who have deceived them?
Jules Guesde, get out of your military automobile. Abandon the gilded cage in which the capitalist state has imprisoned you.
Look about! Perhaps then fate will have pity, for the last time, upon your enfeebled tragical old age, and let you hear once more the dull noise of approaching events.
them, we cause them, we prepare them! The fate of France would be too terrible, if the dolorosa of its working masses did not lead to revenge, to our revenge, where there will be no room for you, Jules Guesde, and for yours. Expelled by you, leave France with the deep certainty of our triumph.
Over and above your head send brotherly greetings to the French proletariat, that is preparing for great actions. Long live, without you and against you, Jules Guesde, Socialist France!
We expect Samuel Gompers By ADOLPH GERMER.
In Pearson Magazine of December, 1914, we find the following from the pen of the erstwhile Socialist and pacifist, Chas.
Edward Russell, headed Inside the European Madhouse. Another reason why we must have no more wars in this world of ours is the fact now demonstrated that at the first breath of war everybody goes crazy. This is not said flippantly nor casually nor recklessly: it refers to a truth about human life hitherto unregarded but demanding now the thoughtful attention of all of us. do not mean crazy in the colloquial use of the word, but literally and absolutely insane. As truly insane, for instance, as any patient in any great asylum, utterly irrational, frantic and irresponsible; insane with a kind of primitive, animal like, wild eyed and perilous dementia, and forcing upon every observer strange, new suggestions of the race hidden capacity for reversion.
The above clearly explains why the one time ultra radicals of the Russell Stokes, Walling, Simons variety make common cause with the ultra reactionary Samuel Gompers.
That Gompers should betray labor into the clutches of American plutocracy is not surprising. He has always been opposed to every measure fostered by the Socialists, and has been a constant political lackey for democratic politicians. But in spite of his political scavenger work, plutocracy has time and again kicked him in the face and his policies have been a mockery for those whose boots he kissed.
To say this without reference to specific instances would not only leave the reader without information, but it would make it appear as if were actuated by unjustified opposition to him.
With the democratic wave in 1912, the labor element in Colorado, under the policy of reward your friends and punish your enemies, succeeded in booting the republicans out of office and putting the democrats in. In addition to the governor and other state house officials, a large number of so called labor men were elected to the legislature. Gompers gave out a statement heralding the Colorado elections as an unprecedented victory.
But when the miners strike came on in the Fall of 1913, LEON TROTZKY.