It has always been so. Why did we go to war against England in 1812? Because the English people had wronged us? The English people, left to themselves, never wronged anybody. We went to war with England in 1812 because the ruling class of England, then deep in the Napoleonic wars, were holding up American ships upon the high seas to take off alleged British subjects and jam them into the British Navy. Such action, of course, was harmful to American pride, but really it did not deeply concern the American working class. Most of the workers lived and died without ever having seen a ship. Nevertheless, the American working class was summoned to the slaughter. My paternal great-grandfather, a humble farmer in the Hudson River Valley, was drafted into the ranks, and to this day I honor him because he would not go without being drafted. And, when the war was ended, the working class of America was worse off than it was before. So was the working class of England. Some were dead. Some were shattered in health. The living lived less well because they had to pay the cost of hell. The impressment of alleged British subjects upon the high seas ceased only because Great Britain chose to end it. The treaty of peace contained no stipulation that she should end it. Thus ceased this criminally stupid war, which never would have begun if the people of England, instead of a small ruling class, had ruled their own country. The war with Mexico was so monstrous that General Grant, who fought in it, denounced it in the strongest language at his command. In the second chapter of the first volume of his “Memoirs,” after characterizing the Mexican War as “unholy,” he says: “The occupation, separation and annexation” (of Texas) “were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union. Even if the annexation itself could be justified, the manner in which the subsequent war was forced upon Mexico cannot.... The Southern Rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War.” Do you get that? Two wars caused by slavery. Seven hundred thousand men killed. Twenty billion dollars’ worth of wealth either destroyed outright, or consumed for interest upon the public debt, or paid for subsequent pensions. And for what? To settle the question of slavery. To settle the question of slavery that the men who framed the national Constitution, most of whom were slaveholders, permitted to exist. To settle the question of slavery, which, never for one moment, during all of those intervening years, was anything but a curse even to the white working class.