Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/42

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MILITARISM

velopment at which every citizen, provided with an easily procurable little staff charged with a mysterious force similar to electricity, is able at any moment to produce the most destructive effects. Indeed, we may expect science, the easy mastering of the most tremendous natural forces by man, to reach such a stage, however distant that time may be, at which the application of the science of murder on the battlefield will become an impossibility because it would mean the self-destruction of the human race, and at which the exploitation of scientific progress is transformed again as it were from a plutocratic into a democratic, universally human possibility.

SOME FACTS FROM THE HISTORY OF
MILITARISM.

In the lowest civilizations where class-division is unknown, arms, as a rule, serve as implements of labor. They serve for the acquisition of food (for the chase, for digging roots), also as a protection against wild animals, as a defence against hostile tribes and for attacking the latter. They