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THE
flUilC TKADE
VOL. LVII. No. 1.
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman Bill at 373 Fourth Ave., New York, July 5,1913
SING
$2.OS°P P ER S YEA£ E N T S
Wars, Rumors of Wars and Business.
D
URING the past few months the stock markifo
havp been depressed at times
by reason of the war scare in Europe, the possibility of American intervention in Mexico
and a conflict with Japan. It is undeniable that these scares have had a detrimental effect
upon business interests of Europe as well as those of America. Trade everywhere has
suffered to a more or less extent.
Europe to-day is almost an armed camp, and its people are being taxed heavier all the while
to maintain huge standing armies. Every year adds to the war load, while we prate of universal
peace.
Is not war proof of the impotence of civilization, the outward sign of the inward ignorance
and stupidity of those who rule, the utter failure of those who govern the nations to grasp the first
elements of order and justice?
The sober judgment of the clearest thinkers corroborates the statement of Ben Franklin that
"there never has been a good war or a bad peace." War always means someone has blundered.
War is always proof of the impotent management of the governing class.
Government is merely an affair of organization—a machine to secure justice between man
and man. Superiority of artillery is supposed to determine what is right. To decide what is right,
the disputants blow up cities that are the result of generations of constructive effort, calling work-
men from their tasks and having them pierced by bayonet and shredded by shrapnel, trampling
down the growing crops and leaving there the gory windrows of human bodies that are the har-
vest of war.
And in the end what will happen? Just what has and always will. A company of diplomats
will gather around a council table and arrange matters. Why could they not do this before the out-
break of horrors?
Simply because all nations are under the delusion of militarism. When great armies are kept
up, bodies of men withdrawn from productive labor, impatient in idleness, lusting for war as their
opportunity for efficiency, then war is inevitable.
After all, life appears to be a battleground in some way or other, whether in business or with
bayonet.
We talk about our advanced civilization, but as a matter of fact the people of the world are
prone to rush into war with the same rage that characterized the struggles of hundreds of years
ago.
'
Some say that war is necessary—that some questions can only be settled by the arbitrament of
the sword. That might have been true years ago, but to affirm that to-day is to deny that the world
has progressed.
War may be magnificent, but in the language of General Sherman—who knew it with all of
its horrors—it is hell.
Competition between nations should be no fiercer than between individuals, and business men
do not wish to resort to carnage and destruction of property and lives in order to carry a business
point. Why then should not nations which are made up of many individuals, brought together for
the purpose of governing themselves, abandon those methods which are out of date and uncivi-
lized in our present age?
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(Continued on page 5.)