“The first reason for all wars and for the necessity of national defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European nations, are Thieves, and in their hearts, greedy of their neighbours’ goods, land, and fame. But besides being Thieves they are also fools, and have never yet been able to understand that if Cornishmen want pippins cheap, they must not ravage Devonshire--that the prosperity of their neighbours is in the end, their own also; and the poverty of their neighbours, by the communism of God, becomes in the end, their own.” “And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists--that is to say, people who live by percentages on the labour of others, instead of by fair wages for their own.”[110] “There is no physical crime at this day, so far beyond pardon--so without parallel in its untempted guilt, as the making of war-machinery, and invention of mischievous substance. Two nations may go mad, and fight like harlots--God have mercy on them:--you, who hand them carving knives off the table, for leave to pick up a dropped sixpence, what mercy is there for you?”[111] “The men who have been killed within the last two months, and whose work, and the money spent in doing it, have filled Europe with misery which fifty years will not efface, had they been set at the same cost to do good instead of evil, and to save life instead of destroying it, might by this 10th January, 1871, have embanked every dangerous stream at the roots of the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po, and left to Germany, to France and to Italy, an inheritance of blessing for centuries to come--they and their families living all the while in brightest happiness and peace. And now! Let the Red Prince look to it: red inundation bears also its fruit in time.”[112] He calls War “the moral organization of massacre, and the mechanical reduplication of ruin.”[113] “All the cruellest wars inflicted, all the basest luxuries grasped by the idle classes, are thus paid for by the poor a hundred times over” (in interest on debt).[114]