[Footnote 65: Kautsky: "Die Internationalität und der Krieg" (Vorwärts Publishing House, Berlin, 1915), p. 26. "We have fought against the military system not to make the land defenceless, but in order to introduce another system in its place, which will give us the necessary guarantees that the army will always be the tool of the civil authorities and never their master. When the latter is the case we call such a condition 'militarism,' and it is against that alone that we fight." Seeing that military power is absolutely subordinated to the civil authorities in the case of Great Britain (Mutiny Acts), then according to the principles of German Socialists their British colleagues were wrong in all the efforts which they have made against the armed powers of these islands.] In Halle, Herr Bebel made this statement: "I have already made it clear that I consider the efforts of the so-called peace friends towards disarmament to be useless (_aussichtslos_), because it is unthinkable that the rival States would agree to legal restrictions concerning disarmament. If such were made, each would endeavour by secret preparations to out-do the other. War and national enmity are necessary products of society, and the existing class distinctions." The Germans were quite logical in this matter; in effect they said--the existing States and forms of government make militarism necessary, and war inevitable. Therefore we declare war to the knife on every existing government, including Russian Czarism, British constitutionalism, German autocracy and American republicanism. They are one and all rotten, unjust and inhuman. Our programme includes their complete overthrow and the erection in their stead of a _Volksstaat_ (People's State). The position is perfectly simple, and to those who are sufficiently ignorant and naïve this programme promises an universal salvation, as delirious in its joy as that expected by African races when bending the knee before images of wood and stone. German Socialists are pledged just as irrevocably to the doctrines of brute force as are the Junker and military powers in the German Fatherland. What is their industrial and class warfare but an attempt to enforce the doctrine of might is right? In the official programme drawn up at Erfurt, 1891, there is a paragraph stating a claim for _uneingeschränktes Koalitionsrecht_ (absolute and unlimited right of coalition), which means that the masses may unite to enforce what they will, and annihilate whom they please. The same rights of coalition are denied to anyone else, and in the coal-strikes in South Wales[66] we have a lurid example--such instances could not be found in Germany--of the absolute and unlimited right of coalition at the risk of undoing any and every other right. [Footnote 66: The strikes during the present war.--Author.]