The American working class profited no more from the war with the Philippines, which was fought solely to provide a new field for the dollar-activities of American capitalists. There is no American workingman who now finds it easier to make a living because of the generally improved conditions brought about by the war with the Philippines. General conditions have not been improved. They have been made worse to the extent that the cost of the war is a burden upon industry. If working-class interests had been consulted, the war never would have been waged. No working class interest was involved. The workers had everything to lose, including life, by going to the front, and nothing to gain. But they “followed the flag”—and some of them never came back. They stayed—six feet under ground—that the Tobacco Trust, the Timber Trust, and many other great capitalist interests might stay on the islands above the ground. Look wherever you will, you cannot find a working class interest that should or could cause workingmen to slaughter each other. Nor is this situation new. It is as old as war itself. It is a fact that men of sense and honesty have always recognized. Tacitus said: “Gold and power are the chief causes of war.” Dryden, the poet, said: “War seldom enters but where wealth allures.” And Carlyle, in this striking fashion, showed the utter absence of working-class interest in war: “To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil in the British village of Dumrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain ‘natural enemies’ of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say, thirty able-bodied men. Dumrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them. She has not, without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood and even trained them up to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under some thirty stone, avoirdupois. “Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected, all dressed in red and shipped away, at public expense, some two thousand miles, or, say, only to the south of Spain, and fed there till wanted. “And now, to the same spot in the South of Spain, are sent thirty similar French artisans—in like manner wending their ways, till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition, and thirty stand facing thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the order ‘Fire!’ is given, and they blow the souls out of one another; and, in the place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury and anew shed tears for. “Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. “How, then?