Everywhere, every day the toilers of the world listen—listen more respectfully, listen more intelligently, listen more gratefully to the glad new gospel of justice and peace. The change comes and come it must. That cruel spell wrought over the mind of the multitude by the bribed orator, by the purchased writer, by the blood-lusting “man on horseback,” and by the far-looking masters of industry—that spell will be, must be, broken. The iron shackles on the wrists and ankles of the toilers have already been broken. The wage-slaves’ shackles also must be rended, not only the industrial, but the mental slavery of the modern workers must be destroyed. And comes now swiftly forward that soft-toned, but all-conquering gospel of peace and freedom—freedom for the dumb, voiceless multitude, now deadened with the deafening roar of machinery, deadened with the stifling dust and withering heat of the mills, deadened with the poisonous gases in the mines, freedom for the multitude soon to be glad, happy, loving, laughing in the commonwealth of cooperation, of mutualism, of fraternalism—of Socialism. Courage, courage. Put the strong shoulders of your twelve million ballots to the “stalled world’s wheel” and push. Strike. March. Dawn-ward toward peace. Know this, you toil-tormented horde: That shrewd juggler’s word war—word with which the swinishly selfish masters have for ages seduced the gullible multitude into the ditches across which those same masters have then rolled on sneering, snickering and safe, that spell-working word reeking with the blood-rotting stench of centuries, that word war and all that that word war now stands for must be stricken from the language of brothers, struck from the affairs of mankind,—forgotten forever—forever replaced by the sweetening peace and the sane abiding power of warless Socialism. Brothers of the working class, wherever you are on all the earth, let us all say, altogether: Peace is patriotism to mankind. _We do not want other people’s blood and we refuse to waste our own._ For thousands of years the ruling class have bled us pale. All cannon have always been aimed at us—by us. We did not see. Our eyes were blinded with our own blood; our minds were paralyzed with lies. But now we see. Now we understand. And therefore now we stand erect in self-respect. Now in sincere fellowship we extend the right hand of brotherhood to all the working men—and to all the women and to all the children—of the whole world; and to all these we promise: We will not fight. We refuse to plunge bayonets into one another’s breasts. We refuse to slay the fathers of tender children. We refuse to murder the brothers and lovers of women. We refuse to butcher the husbands of devoted wives. We refuse to “Hurrah” over victories that break the heart and blind the world with tears. We refuse the cheap rôle of Armed Guard—as the salaried assassins in the service of the plunder-bloated coward ruling class.