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IRELAND

A STUDY IN NATIONALISM

Francis Hackett

The facts in the Irish case (especially the economic), the explanation of the facts and a way of reconstruction. It is critical, impartially informative and enables the reader to judge for himself. The chapters are grouped under the general heads of Causes, Consequences and Remedies.

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Exodus---17

II. "And it came to pass, when Moses held up his a stone and put it under him, and he sat thereon.

hand, that Israel prevailed; and when he let And Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the

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THE LIBERATOR

Vol. 1, No. 5 July, 1918

Editorials

BOTII upon the side of the opposition and upon our

own side, we are suspected of a certain amount of camouflage in what we say editorially in THE LIBERATOR. A humorist in the Evening Post was very genially amused at what seemed to him a sudden appreciation in our May number of the strong points of President Wilson's character. No doubt he never read any of our writings in The Masses but merely accepted a newspaper impression of what they were, and I was genially amused at him when I reflected that those paragraphs in my article which dealt with the President's character were written in the spring-, of 1917.

We do not expect to convince the newspapers or the Post Office of anything, but we do expect our readers to understand that we are not saying things in this magazine that we do not think arc true. We have kept afloat so far in spite of the difficulties that lie in the way of a Socialist press, but when it becomes necessary to paint pictures on the outside of our opinions, we are going to sink.

Socialist Leadership

LEADERSHIP of the social revolutionary move-

ment in this country is in the hands of the Socialist Party as never before. It is for the time being a purely political movement. Socialist action in the industrial field has become practically impossible. The opinion that German victory would be a disaster is (as it always has been) almost universal among American socialists. Today the Allied Armies are fighting to prevent a German victory, and the Socialists, what-ever they may think of Allied diplomacy in the past, and whatever their judgment upon the historic ques-

tion of American participation, will do nothing which might retard that fight.

The instincts of men incline them to unite in war-fare, and only a clearly out-standing conception of duty or of interest to the contrary can withhold them. The growing menace of a Prussian victory, the in-creasing power of labor and internationalist elements among the Allies, the President's peace terms, the German invasion of Socialist Russia, the refraining of the Allies from such invasion, and the Lichnowsky revelation of Germany's original war-purpose, have served to confuse or to remove altogether any such outstanding motive among the majority of Socialists. And thus by a combination of natural instinct with the logic of events, a certain degree of "sacred union" has come into existence in America, as it did in Europe, even though the adminstration upon its side stoutly declines to accede to it.

Even our educational arm is in half suspense. It has become a high crime to swear at the government, and a soap-boxer who can't swear at the government, is for all practical purposes paralyzed. There is a language of crimson belligerence in which the Socialist propaganda has always been conducted, and as this propaganda' was never before heard of by certain members of the President's cabinet, they naturally assume that it is concocted for the express purpose of blocking the war program. The only safe place to pray or make a stump speech is in your own chamber after having shat the door.

In these circumstances there is only one thing left to do-elect individuals that are socialists to Congress. Elect them on a platform of socialism.

The platform at Saint Louis was not adopted for these elections. It was not adopted in these circumstances. It bears no relation to a world in which there exists a soviet republic in danger of annihilation from

6 THE LIBERATOR

four quarters and calling to us for four kinds of help. It bears no relation to a war in which the international peace terms proposed by that republic have been em-bodied in the organized war program of our country. Let it stand-with its faults and virtues-as a monument of our sincere truth to the principle of inter-nationalism as we conceived it to apply at that hour. Our business now is to draft a platform for the congressional elections-a platform that will make clear that we stand for the revolutionizing of all industry along the lines outlined in the abstract by the British Labor Party, and being put to the test of extreme experiment by the ruling proletariat of Russia.

For my part I advocate in that platform a generous recognition of the statement of war aims that President Wilson has dictated to the allied countries. I should like my record and the record of my party, in having opposed the war when we did not know, or have any basis on which to guess, what its concrete aims were, to stand as a guarantee of the vigor and independence with which we will hold out for the material realization of those aims now that we do know what they are.

They have been more fully developed, and developed with more disregard of diplomatic precedent, by the British Labor Party, which is convinced that these aims can only be realized through the solidarity of the working classes of the world. I believe that the Socialist Party of America should join the British Labor Party and the Socialists of France and Italy and Belgium in endorsing President Wilson's war-aims, and developing their implications.

On the other hand, in this country, I think we should lift up the banner of Free Speech and electrify our campaign, as no other party will sincerely do, with that immediate national issue. That America, while taking the lead in the statement of democratic war aims, should fall behind every one of her Allies in the defense and preservation of her own democracy and her own liberty against the encroachments of military hysteria, is an ominous thing that free men can fight even while they are fighting the German imperial power. And this fight for the right to speak must be won every morning, if our civilization is ever to be

understood, and industrial self-government to take the place of that political working-model that we call democracy.

Too Simple

IN the days of Mark Twain life used to consist of

"one damn thing after another." Today it consists of every damn thing at once. There never was so complex a situation in the world-never a situation in which it would be more difficult to speak general truth with assurance. In such a situation most people who have to talk and write, and maintain a reputation for holding opinions, make some artificial and false simplification of the facts, and by ignoring every de-tail that contradicts it, become more cocksure and convinced of themselves than ever: They set up a little autocracy in their own brains, and suppress the voice of any fact or idea that shows a disposition to rebel.

The editor of the New York Tribune conducts this kind of a government within himself, and I think he has a hard time of it. I infer this from the fact that he is always trying and sentencing people under the espionage law. Almost every morning he gives one or two of us a 20 year sentence for disagreeing with him. And when a man is as busy condemning other people as that, you can be sure there is something of what he condemns in himself. The Tribune editor has occasional wayward impulses to recognize the reality-the unspeakably complex reality that con-fronts the mind of man today-and he is sincerely alarmed lest these impulses get the upper hand, and spoil his facility as a purveyor of smooth and durable bourgeois opinions.

The Silver Chord

A FROSTY silence, blank as the wide spaces

Of drifted snow, broods on the brilliant air. Green lakes of ice lie in the white embraces

Of windswept meadows, under skies as bare. Beyond, shrouded in smoky rose, the hills.

A pale bright sun, enmeshed in sombre boughs, Threads these with ruddy haze. And quiet fills

The hollows where the shadow-bringers drowse. Quiet is resonant as some deep bell;

Beauty like music echoes in the brain.

The snow-lit clarity is palpable.

Here is profound appeasement-here is pain. Only the infinite impersonal moves

So poignantly the finite heart that loves.

Babette Deutsch,

July, 1918 7

FROM BAD TO WORSE

OWING to the Republican Party's present place in the v shade, it may he assumed that the Roosevelt-Taft peace was without annexations or indemnities.

THE President properly says, "politics are adjourned." But the administration should remember that in indulging in a meat scandal they are encroaching upon a Republican prerogative.

THE merger of the express companies under government partnership is an admirable move to eliminate the wastes of competition and has the added merit of being scarcely more than three-quarters of a century late.

THAT Minnesota soldier who got 15 years for refusing to be vaccinated may regard himself as an excellent ex-ample of what the President saved us from when he squashed the court martial bill.

IT is improperly charged that the newspaper publishers
were over-zealous in their opposition to the zone postal
provision. All they said was: "Woodrow, spare that tree."

AMONG life's little ironies is the way our "patriotic" press supports the White, or pro-German government of Finland against the Reds. They might be called the Pressians.

"PRUSSIAN electoral reform," says the N. Y. Evening Post, "is hanging in the balance " Yes, but the trouble is, it is hanging by the neck.

ANTI-SUFFRAGE organizations have gone out of business in New York and in Great Britain, but the New York Times will go down with its boots on. After studying the enrollment statistics it finds that New York women are no more zealous in the public service than men.

WIT'S sorrow over this discovery suggests the Kaiser's regular Monday morning weep over the desolation in France. ALL STREET says that McAdoo's increase in rates is a post-mortem vindication of the railroads. The people will not object to any kind words about the departed as long as they are sure he is departed for good.

AS we understand the aspirations of the Czecho-Slovaks and the. Jugo Slavs, nothing is to be left of Austria but the smell.

TIDE admirers of a major general who is not so prominent 1 as he used to be, seem to think that the government's motto is, "knock Wood."

PRESIDENT Wilson has decreed that Congress shall stay in Washington all summer and try to think. Congress-men got exemption from the supertax but not from the anti-loafing order.

THE peevish chairman of the Ways and Means Committee thinks that Washington in the summertime is too hot for Kitchin work.

GOING from bad to worse-

DELAYED reports from the Britishers who plugged up Zeebrugge indicate that they had a corking good time, HOWARD BRURAT<ER.

CULTURE

"Oh, Mamma, see the air-plane!"

"Evangelina, how many times must I tell you not to point !"

The Score Board

ANOTHER run goes up. A thousand throats Are torn with jubilant and raucous cheers. God's in His heaven again; the gray sky clears, Swept by this burst of bright, ecstatic notes. The brassy summons of a bugle floats

Through the wide square, and falls on heedless ears.

The crack of ash is all that each one hears As, deaf to war's old trumpeting, he gloats.

An old, blind beggar squirms among the crowd

Asking "what score" and "who's at bat up there?"

His nervous hands drum on the empty cup. The bugle grows insistent. But a proud

Thunder of mightier music splits the air

Triumphantly. Another run goes up !

By Louis Untermeyer.

SELECTING A PERFECT JURY

By Arturo Giovannitti

OF all the radical organizations in the country, the I. W. W. seems to me the luckiest. Unlike other opposition bodies that must continually distill their brains to find some-thing to do in order to survive, the I. W. W. has never had, and perhaps never will have, to worry about its job. When-ever a war, or an earthquake, or any cataclysm takes place and the I. W. W. returns to the tenderer feelings of charity and piety, and begins to be alarmed by the terrible doubt that perhaps there is something good and decent about the management of the universe-somebody steps in, yanks it off its brotherly embrace of the "common cause" and tells it persuasively that everything is truly and positively rotten -thereby throwing it back into its old corner to fight savagely against everything and everybody.

Sometimes it is a chief of police who, being terrorized by the idea that the I. W. W. might join the army in a body, stops their agitation for a 17 hour workday for all children below 5 and all adults above 93. Sometimes it is the Post Office that stops their papers for openly advocating treason in the form of a raise in wages, and thus returns it to the pleasanter pursuit of raising hell. Some other times patriotic and law-abiding citizens drive hundreds of its members into the. desert for being caught in flagrant possession of Liberty Bonds while on strike. And some other times when it is disturbingly quiet, and therefore under strong suspicion of having been converted to the cause of Allied democracy, a bunch of Christian gentlemen dispatch one of their best leaders to plead that cause by lynching one of its favorite organizers with a rope.

This time, just when the German drive into Russia had about conclusively and definitely convinced all radicals that the Kaiser must be kicked off the earth, and the I. W. W. was on the verge of disbanding under the old name to re-constitute itself into a patriotic legion and fight for God and Country, Mr. Gregory promptly intervened and saved it from self-destruction by bringing the whole bunch to the dock.

And thus, while every other revolutionary organization is up in the air worrying itself into a state of comatose at the thought of its uselessness outside of the battlefield, the I. W. W. through a special dispensation of the Department of Justice, finds itself again in the old field and can go serenely along the old accustomed paths of opposition, with-out losing a tittle of its self-respect.

Where does this extraordinarily lucky misfortune of the I. W. W. come from?

The answer is very simple. It is not the creed of the organization, it is not its action, it is not even its reputation -it is just the mystic power of its cryptic name, the dreadful abracadabra of the three letters that compose it, and which now twelve men good and true are called upon to battle against and exorcize. One wonders truly what would -become of this trial if the I. W. W. had spelled its name with an innocuous X and two meek, law-abiding Qs!

* * *

This is what I was thinking on April 1st, the only inter-national date still observed in universal reverence to the

fundamentals of human nature, when I entered the spacious courtroom of Judge Landis in the Federal Building in Chicago.

As I took my seat among the defendants that were out on bail (for I also was a defendant and, alas for my boardand-room bill! a misguided friend had got me out on bail), a strange feeling suddenly crept through me. I tried to analyze my emotions and felt terribly perplexed at the absolute lack of them. Be it said humbly and meekly, without boastfulness or irreverence, I -felt neither awed nor impressed. Worse still, I felt a disquietin