which sooner or later threatens us all with inevitable bankruptcy?
"It is caused beyond dispute by the expenditure for the maintenance of armaments which swallows up a third and even a half of all the expenditure of European states. And the most melancholy thing is that one can foresee no limit to this augmentation of the budget and impoverish ment of the masses. What is socialism but a protest against this abnormal position in which the greater proportion of the population of our world is placed?"
"We are ruining ourselves," says Frederick Passy in a letter read before the last Congress of Universal Peace (in 1890) in London, "we are ruining ourselves in order to be able to take part in the senseless wars of the future or to pay the interest on debts we have incurred by the sense less and criminal wars of the past. We are dying of hunger so as to secure the means of killing each other."
Speaking later on of the way the subject is looked at in France, he says: "We believe that, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the citizen, the time has come to recognize the rights of nations and to renounce at once and forever all those undertakings based on fraud and force, which, under the name of conquests, are veritable crimes against humanity, and which, whatever the vanity of monarchs and the pride of nations may think of them, only weaken even those who are triumphant over them."
"I am surprised at the way religion is carried on in this country," said Sir Wilfrid Lawson at the same congress. "You send a boy to Sunday school, and you tell him: "Dear boy, you must love your enemies. If another boy strikes you, you mustn't hit him back, but try to reform him by loving him." Well. The boy stays in the Sunday school till he is fourteen or fifteen, and then his friends send him into the army. What has he to do in the army?
