When the war broke out in Europe, with millions of working-men flinging death and misery at one another, men like Chaplin, the world over, regarded it as the last straw. Was it not bad enough that these exploited creatures should be used as factory-fodder? Must they be cannon-fodder too? Why should they fight to increase the economic power of German traders? of British manufacturers? The war was a capitalist war between capitalist nations. What interest had the workers in these nations? in their winnings or in their losses? So ran the argument. The I. W. W. was not primarily an anti-war organization In theory it had abandoned political activity to devote itself exclusively to agitation and organization on the field of industry. Practically its funds and its energies were expended upon industrial struggles. Long before the war, the I. W. W. had made itself known and feared for its conduct of strikes, its free speech fights, and its ability to put the sore spots of American industrial life on the front page of the daily press and to keep them there until the people had become aroused to the wrongs that were being perpetrated. It was in this domain of industry that the I. W. W. was functioning, and it was among the business interests that the determination had been reached to rid the country of the organization at all costs. Had the chief offense of the I. W. W. consisted in its expressed opposition to the war, it would not have been singled out for attack. Many of the peace societies that flourished prior to 1917 were more outspoken and more consistent in their opposition to war than were the leaders of the I. W. W. None of these societies, however, had acquired reputation for championing the cause of industrial under dogs, and for demanding a complete change in the form of American economic life. Consequently, in the prosecution, in the sentences, in the commutations and in the pardons, the anti-war pacifists were treated very leniently, while the revolutionary I. W. W. members were singled out for the most ferocious legal and extra-legal attack. Technically, Ralph Chaplin and his comrades had conspired to obstruct the war. Actually, they had lined themselves up solidly against the present economic order, of which the World War was only one phase. This was their real crime. II. Ralph Chaplin was guilty of the most serious social offense that a man can commit. While living in an old and shattered social order, he had championed a new order of society and had expounded a new culture. Socrates and Jesus, for like offenses, lost their lives. Thousands of their followers, guilty of no greater crime than that of denouncing vested wrong and expounding new truths, have suffered in the dungeon, on the scaffold and at the stake.