Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/193

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SOME CARDINAL SINS
161

parties, particularly to the anti-socialist union, the black hundreds of Germany; the complete isolation of those workmen from even the slightest contact with the Social Democracy: all this demonstrates how perfectly militarism has comprehended its chief task, that of protecting the capitalists, and how it performs it with professional smartness. In this respect no Krupp, no Stumm[1] is fit to hold a candle to militarism, which even surpasses those whose interests it looks after in the energetic manner in which those interests are cared for. In the military work-shops of Spandau, for instance, the influence of the anti-socialist union is such as to make that organization positively the keeper of every workman's conscience in the royal factories, and it is simply for that organization to decide whether a workman is to be dismissed. Another striking proof of that statement was furnished by the incidents connected with the dismissal of the committee of a harmless society of unskilled laborers of the military shops in the


  1. A great German iron-master who was notorious for his reactionary views and his patriarchial ideas on industrial life. [Translator.]