mands that we resist those who have disturbed the peace of Europe. This is a re-hash of the declarations made by all the governments, and of the rant published in all the bourgeois sheets of the entire world. Plekhanov even improves upon his usual Jesuitism, and says that when facing concrete facts we must first of all determine the guilty party and settle accounts with him, putting off till some other time the solution of all other problems. (See Plekhanov's pamphlet on The War, Paris, 1914, and a reprint of its conclusion in Axelrod's Golos, Nos. 86 and 87.) When it corner to sophistic dialectic Plekhanov beats all records. Sophists always manage to spirit away some of the evidence and even Hegel confessed once that one could build up an argument about anything on earth. Intellectual honesty demands that one investigates all the sides of every social phenomenon and every stage of its development, and all the visible manifestations of the various forces at work and of the class struggle. Plekhanov falls back upon a quotation from the German press saying that even the Germans recognized the guilt of Austria and Germany. And that sort of evidence is perfectly satisfactory to him.
He remains absolutely quiet on the Czarist plans of conquest in Galicia, Armenia and other parts of the world, plans which have been exposed many times by the Russian Socialists.
He does not make the slightest effort to look into the diplomatic history of even the last thirty years; that history proves incontrovertibly that the two groups of belligerents had set as their main object the seizure of colonies, the annexation of foreign lands, and the destruction of their successful competitors.[1]
- ↑ See the very interesting book, The War of Steel and Gold, by the English pacifist, H. N. Brailsford, who leans strongly toward Socialism. The book was published in March, 1914. The author realizes clearly that national questions are of secondary importance, that nobody bothers much with them and that the problems which interested diplomacy most were the Bagdad railroad, the supplying of rails for that road, the Moroccean ore deposits etc. (pages 35 and 36). One of the most illuminating incidents in the history of latter day diplomacy is the fight waged by the French patriots and the English imperialists to defeat Caillaux' attempts at a rapprochement with Germany in 1911, 1912 and 1913, on the basis of a division of spheres of influence and the listing of German securities on the Paris Exchange. The English and French bourgeoisie broke that agreement (pages 38–40. The aim of Imperialism is to export capital into weaker countries (page 74). The profits derived from that source in England were 90 or 100 million pounds sterling for 1899, 140 million pounds in 1909 (we may add that Lloyd-George in a recent address estimated those profits at 200 million pounds).
To obtain that object, Turkish leaders are bribed, the sons of important Hindoos and Egyptians supplied with nice little berths (pages 85–87). An
