International Socialist Review (1900) Vol 17

ender .
their price-fixing prerogatives,
what will happen when the war ends?
Will this country hand back to the meat
and bread lords the same powers which
they had when war started? Is it the
usual and customary thing for a nation
of people to seize powers and prerogatives
from the ruling class during war
time and then at the close of the war surrender
those powers
Or does past history
and
tell
prerogatives?
us that once
the government of a nation has broken
the power of an overlord class at certain
points, it is not easy for the overlord
class to regain its former power? It is
on the answers men and women formulate
in their private thinking on these
questions that decides them as to whether
the war will work good for the American
working class through probable nationalization
of food supply.
Will this nation aaopt a rigorous policy
of conscription of wealth?
money and property of the
Will the
possessing
class be confiscated with a direct ruthlessness?
Will the announced policy of
the national administration be followed
to the end that the billions of dollars
voted by the congress for prosecution of
the war is to be raised "from the present
generation"? Will there be no change
in the announced plans that there shall
not be saddled on future generations the
cash cost of the conduct of the war?
Already the unparalleled sum of seven
billion dollars has been voted by congress
for a loan to the allied nations for the
purpose of breaking Prussian autocracy
and establishing political democracy in
the German empire. How will this debt
of seven billion dollars be paid "from the
present generation" unless by rigorous,
uncompromising conscription of the
JACK PHILLIPS €59
wealth of the capitalists of the present
generation? The working class on its
sustenance wage and with its meager
bank savings certainly has no billion nor
any seven billions with which to foot
the colossal war cost already incurred.
There seems to be no way out except
conscription of wealth. From this rises
the further question: Will this nation
originate methods of conscripting wealth
which as methods will survive the war?
Will the working class witness new ways
for seizure from capitalists of the surplus
of unpaid wages held out from the
men in shops and mines? If such methods
and ways are evolved during the
war—if taxes on incomes, inheritances
and special increments are devised and
the capitalist class has its wealth expropropriated
in unprecedented billions,
leaving it at the finish stripped of more
money and property than in any similar
crisis in history—what will be the effect?
Will the process work in such a
way that the war habit will continue
after the war and the nation go on expropriating
surplus values from the master
class in a degree and to an extent
never known before?
These are questions moving every man
of thought today in this country. There
are no answers to these questions except
guess, surmise and conjecture. The only
certainty that may be written is that the*
war is a tremendous gamble and out of
the dice and cards and whirring wheels
of fortune in the chaos of it all, there may
be seizures for democracy of powers and
prerogatives, of practice and discipline in
solidarity, such as may cause the writers
of history to say the Great War put the
clock of progress ahead hundreds of
years.
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