“Friend, please _don’t ask us_ to explain why we fight the wars. We really do not know why we fight the wars. We modern wage-earners do just as the ancient chattel slaves and serfs did. We meekly do as we are told to do by the ‘best people.’ The sleek, glossy folks tell us to ‘rush to the front’—so we meekly march right to the front and blaze away. We furnish the tears, blood, cripples and corpses. We are dead easy—and we don’t understand it at all. Of course, we don’t like to shoot and bayonet one another. It seems so strange to us that the working men should always be ordered to shoot working men;—but our ‘betters,’ our ‘social superiors,’ the ‘men with the brains,’ tell us to ‘show the _stuff_ that is in us’—so it must be all right. Great business men tell us frequently, ‘What this country needs is confidence.’ Well, we working people have the confidence—also the blisters and the lemons and the cold lead. “We are so easy.” THE EXPLANATION.[10] (A)—CAPITALISTS WANT WAR—BECAUSE— War sends up prices—of most things. [Illustration: LEADING CITIZENS: “WE _want_ WARS”] War stimulates business—makes business brisk;—the more blood the more business. War means more investments and more profits;—the more blood the more bonds, more interest; more land and more rent;—more unearned income. War helps solve the problem of the unemployed. Simply have the surplus workers go into a big field and kill themselves off—butcher one another. It is so simple and easy. War makes the working people clap their hands and yell so loudly they can’t think, and as long as the working people don’t _think_, it is _easy_ to keep the bridles and saddles on them. It is surely a thoughtful scheme;—really, it is successful. War—to advocate war, sometimes makes newspapers vastly more popular and therefore more profitable; for recent example, the Hearst papers for the Cuban war and the English jingo papers in the Boer war.[11] [Illustration: LEADING CITIZENS: “WE _declare_ WARS”] War makes a larger home market for toys; that is, for fifes and drums with which the working people excite one another and get themselves into a butchering mood,—“ready to die for their homes and country,” the United States, for example, in which far more than half of all the people have no homes of their own and live in rented houses, and more than one-eighth of all the people live in mortgaged homes,[12] and in which nearly all of the working class are kept so poor that they can’t even have cream—real cream and plenty of it—for their cheap coffee. The fife and drum and some patriotic wind stampede the working class easily. “A nod from a lord is a breakfast for a fool.”