Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/119

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MEANS AND EFFECTS
87

As an employer in great industrial undertakings (such as military store-houses, canning factories, clothing factories, remount-depots, arms and munition factories, navy yards, etc.) militarism does not only willingly and exclusively hand over its employees (on October 31, 1904, there were altogether 54,723 persons employed in industrial establishments owned by the administration of the German army and navy) to all reactionary patriotic demagogues, as, for example, the imperial anti-socialist union, it also attempts to permeate them systematically and ruthlessly with the patriotic militaristic spirit, by bestowing titles and decorations on them, arranging for them festivals in the manner of the veterans' associations, promising them impossible pensions, by outlawing the trade union and introducing into its shops a veritable barracks discipline. Among the government work-shops the shops of the military administration present the hardest problem in the campaign for the enlightenment of the proletariat. There is naturally a limit to the influence exercised by the forces hostile to the labor movement, and it can