This terrible war lasted two years. But it would certainly have closed in six months because of lack of funds—if Christian business men and gentle, “cultivated” Christian women of the world had refused to lend money to the two sleek groups of official brutes in Japan and Russia who were forcing hundreds of thousands of humble working men into Manchuria to slaughter one another. Just charge up twenty-four months of that ferocious blood-spilling—charge it, not only to the Christian barbarians the Tsar and his friends, and the un-Christian Mikado and his pagan capitalist friends, but also to the civilized, fur-lined, orthodox savages of Western Europe and of the United States who were so wolfishly eager for unearned incomes in interest on war bonds that they were willing, by lending money to fan the flames of war,—willing to foster wholesale murder, willing to wet the earth with working class blood and tears—willing thus to sink their industrial tusks deep into the quivering flesh of the toilers of Japan and Russia. Always there is a reason. At one time in the war Japanese statesmen offered interest-bearing, Japanese national bonds for sale in San Francisco. There was instantly a swinish scramble by lily-fingered Christian ladies and gentlemen of that city to buy those pagan blood-wet bonds; the bonds were thus purchased immediately—with the unblushing promptness of greed. The offers of cash vastly exceeded the amount of the bonds offered. And now these “leading Christian citizens,” having thus stuck out their tongues in scorn at the Christ of Peace, having thus given the loud laugh of contempt for the noble sentiment of the brotherhood of man,—these eminently respectable cannibals by means of their bond purchases having adjusted their scornful lips to the veins of the far-away working class of Japan—_are satisfied_; and for a generation they will suck and tug—like beautiful tigers at the throats of common work horses—will suck the industrial blood of the working class they despise. This blood-sucking process will be called “business.” The blood they suck will be called “interest.” These gilt-edged cannibals will continue to be called “the very best people of San Francisco.” Their occasional contribution to Christian missionary work in Japan will be called “splendid generosity.” Their “views” on the “harmony of capital and labor” will be quoted in many capitalist newspapers as “sound advice.” And, strangely enough, these smooth murderers—particeps criminis—will actually go unhung, such is the irony of the present order. And these distinguished abettors of international assassination will—with crafty thoughtfulness—occasionally visit the armories and barracks in San Francisco and carefully flatter the working class militia and the working class “regulars,” flatter them into the folly of standing guard for those who despise and betray and bleed the working class of the whole world.