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monopolize the world's markets with the aid of conquests, treaties colonization and the ruin of old native industries. Women and children are pressed into the service of manufactories and to supplant men, especially the expert and educated handicraftsmen. If that is not sufficient to render production cheap, and labor submissive, and profits large, foreign cheap labor is imported, and the organization of laborers for mutual protection of their standard of life is warred against. Men are made cheap for the sake of rendering merchandize cheap. Few men can now follow a congenial vocation and natural inclination to work; they must drudge as servants of machines and overseers, simply for the profit of capitalists. The latter themselves oust one another from the market, each manufacturing nation is at industrial war with all others, and more and more capitalists are ruined for the benefit of fewer and fewer large ones.
This is anarchy under the disguise of peace, law and order. Anarchy rules supreme in all modern countries, whether republican or monarchical, democratic or despotical, protectionist or free trade. And the result is the general impoverishment of a majority of every nation, the destruction of capital itself by the utter ruin of the purchasing power of nations, and commercial and financial crises and crashes which return every few years, on an ever larger scale. And all the statesmanship in existence is utterly unable to remedy this self-imposed misery and retrogradation.
All this was foreseen and prophesied by the science of the political economy of the social-democratic school of Karl Marx. But their doctrine, although never controverted, was discredited, and the party advocating it was subjected to persecutions of all kinds, as though they were not physicians of the sick times, but quacks and the cause of all the world's misery. They knew that all prophets were doomed to martyrdom and took to endurance and quiet organization, and propaganda of their ideas among the masses. The sacrifices of the old Christian martyrs were reproduced, at least in Europe, and tens of thousands paid with their lives for the confession of their sacred and well demonstrable convictions.
No wonder that a few of this great host of sufferers lost their patience and turned out practical Anarchists. Despairing of any other rescue than by forcible means, and goaded on by the murder and ruin of thousands of comrades, they vowed bloody revenge and became criminals from motives of humanity. They preached, and, in a few cases, practiced murder and robbery of those whom they in their despair took for members of a murdering and robbing class.
We Social Democrats do not imitate, do not even excuse them.
