right to know the whole truth, be it pleasant or unpleasant. It is even our duty to know it, unless we are poltroons who fear to look reality in the face. You need not search the files of "The Masses" for records of greatness that has been lavished in the war! We know all about this, anyhow, from the official reports with which we are deluged. What we do not sufficiently know, what people do not wish to know, is the material and moral unhappiness, the injustice, the oppression which, as Bertrand Russell points out, are for each nation the obverse of every war, however just.—That is why, as far as America is concerned, we must consult the uncompromising periodical which I am about to quote.
⁂
Max Eastman, the editor, is the soul of "The Masses." He fills it with his thought and his energy. The two last issues to reach me, those of June and July, 1917, contain no less than six articles from his pen. All wage implacable warfare against militarism and blind nationalism. Nowise duped by official declamations, Eastman declares that this war is not a war for democracy. The real struggle for liberty will come after the war.[1] In the United States, as in Europe, the war has been the work of capitalists, and of a group of intellectuals, clerical and lay.[2] Max Eastman insists on the part played by the intellectuals, whilst his collaborator John Reed emphasises the part played by the capitalists. Similar economic and moral phenomena have been apparent in the Old World and in the New. In the United States, as in Europe, many socialists support the war. A number of them (notably Upton Sinclair, with whom I am personally acquainted, and whose moral sincerity and idealist spirit I fully appreciate) have adopted this strange militarism. They champion universal conscription, in the hope that after the "war for democracy" "the socialist movement will know
