We must bear this truth constantly in mind: if the Hohenzollerns have succeeded, in accordance with Mirabeau’s epigram, in making war ‘the national industry,’ it is because, ever since the dawn of history, the Germans have always subordinated everything to their passion for lucrative wars. The same is true of them to-day. Especially in the last twenty years the secret propaganda of the Berlin government has convinced the masses that the creation of Pan-Germany will assure them immense material benefits. It is because this conviction is so firmly rooted among them that substantially the entire body of Socialist workingmen are serving their Kaiser without flinching, and are willing to endure the horrors of the present conflict so long as it may be necessary and so long as they are not conquered in the field. 4. _Peace through the International_ This is another of the tricks conceived at Berlin. In reality the International, having always followed the direction of the German Marxists, has been the chief means employed for thirty years to deceive the Socialists of the countries now in alliance against Germany by inducing them to believe that war, thanks to the International alone, could never again break out. In a report on ‘the international relations of the German workingmen’s unions’ (1914), the Imperial Bureau of Statistics was able to proclaim as an undeniable truth: ‘In all the international organizations German influence predominates.’ The conference at Stockholm, initiated by German agents, and that at Berne, upon which they are now at work, are steps which German unionism is taking to reëstablish over the workingmen of all lands the German influence, which has vanished since the war began. The idea now is to force the proletariat of the whole world into subjection to the guiding hand of Germany. The object officially avowed is to rehabilitate the International in the interest of democracy. In reality, it is proposed, above all else, to replace in the front rank the struggle between classes in the Allied countries, in order to destroy the sacred unity that is indispensable to enable the most divergent parties to wage war vigorously against Pangermanist Germany. As the Berlin government is well aware that it has nothing to fear from its own Socialists, the vast majority of whom, even when they disown the title of Pangermanists, are partisans of Central Pan-Germany, the profit of the manœuvre based on the International would inure entirely to Germany, who would retain her power of moral resistance unimpaired, while the Allied states, once more in the grip of the bitterest social discord, would find their offensive powers so diminished by this means that peace would in the end be negotiated on the basis of the present territorial occupations of Germany. 5. _The armistice trick_