WAR

Maoriland Worker, Volume 12, Issue 294, 18 October 1922, Page 5

WAR

Bring Out Your Living

(By J. BEBCHAM.)

The war clouds again hover over the planet we call earth. The hired press .scribes, the mercenaries of Capitalism, are endeavouring to inculcate the War God's enthusiasm iato the minds of the working classes, The dangers of the mass being again hypnotised by the press-jugglers into a panicky state call for, some antidote. Whom do nations appoint to make or prevent wars? A score or two of diplomats and politicians, cynics, artificers of the artificial, who live in houses where war's knocking is mufflled, his cry nothing more than, "Masters, ye have unleashed mc, I am off to my garnering." Not here is hia harvest. Not from Kings drunk with ambitions, financiers whose fingers itch for their contracts, politicians who play pawns with stalwart men's lives and poor broken hearts. War does not claim them. He goes to the industrial centres, to the country for ■the labouring farmers. He winnows the long streets of the cities and towns, taking from every home a man and leaving a woman too stricken to we.ep. He ramsacks the huts ot the poor and smashes their breadwinners into phosphate to manure alien soil.

I AM WAR, says this monster, I know no human bonds. I am the Great Sexton, whom man has created himself, because he is impatient for his grave. I am War, contrived by old men for the riddance of the young/ generation that jostle them, and by macf men to prove that all mankind is mad. lam the great Epicurean, for I take only the .stalwart, the prime, the gallant. I leave you the halt, the weakliag, the tuberculosis, the criminal safe in your prisons. The insane safe in the asylums; the diseased to breed your prosperity, and I leave you the fatherless children and the broken women to stare into empty destinies. You shall build up your nation again with the.se. You shall confute evolution with these. The hired press writers shall publish to these the charge of the mass-ed battalions whose 50 men You shall thrill and consols these with your war correspondents' tales of the heaped trenches. The orchestra of human agony. The delirium of hunger and thirst. You shall delight these with the horrors of the cholera and typhus plagues, how men writhed in agony. You shall prove to the very brute creations the nobility of man by your picture of the transport cattle, goaded to death or shelled into red mud.

War rligs for ever new cemeteries for "the fit. Wars will not cease until they can only De made by dwellers in glass' houses. If these suave gentlemen had been given munitions and a field of battle and ordained to settle the great proposition, it would soon have vanished. War is, and ever has been, the mighty deluder who makes all march to the beat of his drum, who sets our hearts throbbing by the tramp of the regiments. The appeal to -pas&'ion, the cry of primeval man. We follow him gaping and cheering. WE DO NOT SEE WHITHER HE LEADS.

Can Civilisation go on for ever thus in its self-mockery? Women must still bring forth children in agony and yearn over tliem with care, for War to devour them when they are strong sons. Taxes shall for ever wring pence out of narrow homes to forge machines that swathe down strong men like corn: For "War is inevitable." Who makes it so? THE VOICSS OF FOOLS AND ADVENTURERS IN THE WIND. WHY IS IT INEVITABLE ? WHO CAN ANSWER THAT ?