The war of 1870, as we all know, was for Germany a declared war of defence, exactly like the present war. Germany is always defending herself at the world’s expense. No sooner, however, had the ostensible motive of defence been satisfied by Sedan, than the real objects of German militarism began to be revealed. Unhindered by the earlier protestations of the Emperor William that Germany was at war only with Napoleon and not with France, the militarists inspired the German liberal bourgeoisie to press for annexations in the name of race and security. They dared to pretend, said Marx, that the people of the two provinces were burning to be annexed to Germany, and they adopted without reflection the excuse of the military party that a rectification of the Imperial frontiers was a strategic necessity. Thus, concluded Marx, they insisted upon sowing in the terms of peace the seeds of new wars—the phrase is Marx’s own. And what wars, too! Marx was not blind to their probable character. History, he said, would not measure the German offence by the number of miles of territory annexed, but by the significance of the fact of annexation. This significance was no less than a declaration of “a policy of conquest,” from which might be anticipated in logical order a German racial war against “the Slav and Latin races combined.” The war of 1870, having thus ended, would, he said, be the precursor of a series of international wars, in the course of which it was probable that the working-classes everywhere would succumb to the forces of militarism and capitalism. What comment has the _Call_ or any of our contemporary Marxian pacifists to make upon this? It is not right that they should ignore it, more especially when it is recalled that Marx paid a tribute to the English working-classes of his day, who “protested with all their might against the dismemberment of France.”