every lady in the upper classes of the civilized world would simply vow that while any cruel war proceeds SHE WILL WEAR BLACK -a mute's black-with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse for nor evasion into prettiness-I tell you again no war would last a week."

There is sound sense in this. It would show that YOU DO CARE, and that you want all the world to see that you care.

It would bring home to the hearts of men that war, for women, is as hideous and hated as a pest.

It would mean that the glory and tinsel of war are past, and that we know it now as a stupid, expensive and brutish way of settling disputes.

Let the women of America go into mourning! What a silent, tremendous appeal to the people of Europe!

And, more especially, let the women of society, they who set the styles, they who dress and whose ways are held up before the multitude in the Sunday newspapers and the magazines, let them for once realize their responsibility, that they at last can DO SOMETHING, the ONLY THING perhaps that I will save the world.

If, instead of burning peasants' houses and

mangling the men children of women of low degree, war smashed YOUR china and slaughtered YOUR offspring, would you go on with your dancing, and still beautify yourselves and play at precedence?

No. You would shut yourselves up, put on the rags of woe, and even if helpless you would voice by your habiliments the dumb protest of your misery.

This war is no foreign, far-off affair. It is a hideous outbreak of barbarity, the assassination of civilization; it is the sword piercing the breast of a hundred thousand Marys.

Women of high society, for the first time in your lives, perhaps, you have an opportunity to help the world, to bring mad rulers back to reason.

Put on black! Refuse to adorn yourself! Engage in no feastings nor revelry so long as the Red Death stalks.

Monday, August 10, 1914.

WAR AND THE WORKINGMAN

THERE is an excellent article entitled "War and the Interests of Labor," by A. S. Johnson, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, March, 1914, and has now been reprinted in pamphlet form by the American Association for International Conciliation. Write to this Association for it and you will receive a copy gratis. Address 407 West 117th Street, New York City.

Every laboring man, every wageworker, ought to read it. To show its importance, I give the following digest of its main points:

War, whomsoever it may benefit, is, to the modern industrial worker, stark calamity and nothing more.

Grant that it is necessary or advantageous to this or that person or class, to YOU it means nothing but ruin. The nation may get a larger map, some generals and admirals may get prize money, a sword, and a statue, but all YOU get out of it is pain of body, anguish

of spirit, wounds, disease, death, the distress, and perhaps the dispersal of your family.

The new campaign against militarism is not confined to preachers and Socialists; it is advocated by conservative labor leaders everywhere. For they know that, while OTHERS MAY WIN by war, LABORERS CAN ONLY LOSE.

In former times war paid the common soldier because he got part of the loot from the conquered people. Nowadays he gets nothing but his little wage. When Germany took Alsace and Lorraine from France the German soldiers never gained land or loot.

There is no money for the common soldier even in sea fights, for since 1854 the enemy's goods under a neutral flag are exempt from seizure.

When we conquer another nation, the only way an ordinary soldier can acquire any of its territory is to BUY it. We could do that without fighting. The rules of modern warfare have shut out the private soldier's plunder.

The acquiring of foreign colonies by conquest never advances a laborer one cent; it profits only the property holding class. Did any workingman's wages go up the fraction of a cent because we captured the Philippines?

There is no chance for the ordinary worker to rise, to achieve distinction or emolument in a war these times. The man who enters the army as a private at the beginning of a war comes out a private at its close. It is only the officers from the upper and middle classes who are promoted.

The adventure of war has disappeared. You can travel to-day anywhere on land or sea without joining an army. "It is no longer necessary to go to war in order to see the world or to experience life."

The financial aftermath of war burden rests upon the working class. It is their children who are unschooled, their sick who cannot get hospital service, their families that suffer from epidemics, all because of the war debt.

Worst of all, war is a diversion; it distracts public attention from the workers' efforts to gain their rights. The war spirit is always reactionary. Many a war in history has been engineered by the rulers in order to divert the common people from demanding their rights.

Peace is essential to progress. War means the triumph of the moss-back.

Tuesday, August 11, 1914.