(=13=) In connection with the foregoing section 12 examine Chapter Seven, Section 18. “War! War! War!... God send the women sleep in the long, long night, when the breasts on whose strength they leaned heave no more.”[266] Wives and mothers of the working class, as soon as the government has had your choicest sons slaughtered, the government is _through with you_—except to send you a miserable, blood-stained, silver sop, a sort of cash bribe, once a quarter. Then as you receive the vile cash, you can, in imagination, hear the shrieks of your dead loved ones. The government seeks to win your approval and to silence your hearts’ protests against human butchery with the cheap jingle of some filthy dollars—as if you had sold your sons and husbands for a price. Such a pension is a form of hush money. “If the stroke of war fell certain on the guilty heads, none else ... but alas! That undistinguishing and deathful storm Beats heaviest on the exposed and innocent; And they that stir its fury, while it raves Safe at a distance send their mandates forth.”—Crowe. Robert G. Ingersoll wrote:[267] “Nations sustain the relations of savages to each other.... “No man has imagination enough to paint the agonies, the horrors, the cruelties, of war. Think of sending shot and shell crashing through the bodies of men! Think of the widows and orphans! Think of the maimed, the mutilated, the mangled!...” Let the working class mothers beware of crafty and cowardly politicians and business men seeking to excite them with the shallow cry: “The flag! Our country! Our homes!” For the mothers’ sake it is worth the space to restate the fact here: _That more than half of all the mothers in the United States have no homes of their own and must live in rented homes, and more than one-eighth of them live in mortgaged homes_.[268] And vast numbers of the mothers in the United States live in mean, small houses with scarcely a single modern convenience. Mothers, keep your eyes on the bankers and the manufacturers and the other “leading citizens”: they and their sons and sons-in-law are not shedding a large quantity of their “blue” blood for “our” country and “our” homes and “our” flag; _and they can not be wheedled into doing so_. Watch them closely, mothers, both before a war and during a war. Don’t get excited. Remember Christ’s “Put up thy sword.” St. Paul said, “Follow peace with all men.” You have heard of this doctrine: “Thou shalt not kill.” “War has no pity,” said Schiller. “God is forgotten in war, and every principle of Christianity is trampled under foot,” said Sidney Smith. “To be tender-minded Does not become a sword.”—Shakespeare. “War is one of the greatest plagues that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion ... it destroys families. Any scourge, in fact, is preferable to it.... Cannon and fire-arms are cruel and damnable machines.”—Martin Luther.