When at the street-side a boy of seven, watching a military parade, shouts in gleeful admiration and claps his small hands in happy hurrahs, Mars, the bloody god of war, begins to fasten his clutches on the little fellow, the child’s imagination takes fire with visions and hopes, his soul begins to thrill with the kill-lust, then and there he is being prepared to enlist—when he “gets big.” How different it would be for the small boys if, when soldiers were marched through a city, these armed slayers of their kind should march at night with all lights out and with the rumble of drums and the frequent boom of cannon in the darkness making the air tremble. The working class mother might well consider this matter. She has all to lose.[235] In the average parade-and-review the workingman is made ridiculous. Did you ever see prominent bankers or other “better class” business men in large numbers trudging along afoot in the middle of the dusty or muddy street, marching and sweating miles and miles past a gay-colored reviewing-stand to be “reviewed” and grinned at by a bunch of sugar-coated crooks in the “reviewers’ stand”? No! And you never will. The trudging and the sweating, as usual, are handed over to the “common people,” chiefly the wage-slaves. When the “very _best_ people” do take part in the parading before the “grand-stand,” they ride, up front, in carriages or on horseback. They laugh and chat and gaily enjoy the stupid gullibility of the working men as the humble fellows are thus “bell-weathered” through the dirt and heat. On the occasion of a recent great parade in New York City a well-known capitalist gliding along in a handsome automobile swaggeringly called out, “We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and we’ve got the money too!” A seedy, hungry-looking young man proudly answered back, “You bet we have!” On the same occasion thousands of ten-dollar-a-week clerks and factory workers were charmed into hand-clapping as the gaudily dressed soldiers marched by carrying the very rifles they were ready to use to crush the admiring toilers if they should strike and struggle for justice. The usual “review” is a pompous occasion on which hundreds or thousands of meek, ill-fed, cotton-lined, callous-palmed working men “hoof it” for an hour or so past a “reviewing-stand” occupied by some grinning, well-fed, silk-lined, lily-fingered, decorated “great” men who scorn even the thought of the working class having a political party of their own for their own self-defense. (=31=) A great many fathers and sons are thinking a good deal about an “era of peace” to be ushered in mainly through the good offices of peace societies. The Hague Peace Conference is, in the judgment of many people, “the hope of the world.”[236]