Eight billion dollars virtually tossed into the flames by the well-fed kings, emperors, tsars, presidents, and champagne-guzzlers in the national legislatures of twenty-one “highly civilized” countries—while tens of millions of the toilers in these same countries shiver and starve, meanly clothed, meanly housed, meanly fed, their children growing up in the dull ignorance that renders them the easy tools and fools for the firing line. One year’s cost of militarism in these twenty-one countries ($8,000,000,000) would keep thirty-two million students in college for one year—allowing $250 each. The cost of militarism in these twenty-one countries for less than nine hours and a half would pay all the expenses of 4,500 students in Harvard University for four years, allowing each student $500 per year. SIX PER CENT. INTEREST ON THIS $8,000,000,000 FOR ONE YEAR WOULD PROVIDE A FOUR-YEAR COLLEGE EDUCATION FOR 480,000 YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN, ALLOWING EACH STUDENT $250 PER YEAR. $8,000,0000,000 annually—in time of peace! Clap your hands in stupid glee, O, blind devotees of the blood god Mars! Celebrate! Scream “Hurrah! Hurrah!”—in idiotic glad madness. Yell, fool, yell: “Hurrah for hell!” For war! War! War! War! It is great! Isn’t it? It must be great, for “_great_ men” say it is so. “_Great_ men” never deceive humble, common working men. Never. Of course not. When “great men” call: “Rally to the flag, boys!” will my toiling brothers become again the fools and tools for such as they who in Parliaments and Congresses vote for this red-dripping stupidity? $8,000,000,000 every twelve months on war and preparations for war—and yet _not a single silk-hatted snob sleeps in the dingy barracks, or eats the cheap “grub” fed to the privates, or submits to humiliating insults from “superior” officers, or spills his blood on the firing line_—not one anywhere in all the world. $8,000,000,000—the annual cost of lust—war lust. The annual cost of jungle statesmanship. THE COST THE WORKING CLASS PAY FOR BEING MEEK, DOCILE, OBEDIENT—READY TO SLAUGHTER THEMSELVES, READY TO BUTCHER THEIR BROTHERS OF THE WORKING CLASS. $8,000,000,000, the price the working class pay for being prejudiced, ignorant, unwilling to read;—and for cringing, for neglecting to place the _working_ class in the _legislatures of the world_. $8,000,000,000—this sum proves the moral bankruptcy, proves the colossal savagery—of capitalists who _want_ war, and proves also the intellectual and moral bankruptcy, the brainless incapacity and unspeakable villainy of the gilt-edged crooks called statesmen who are always ready to _declare_ wars and who perpetually bleed society by thus “preparing for wars” in which they themselves, like the “business men,” are too proud and cunning to fight on the firing line.