Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE LIKELIHOOD OF WAR TODAY TT AVING assumed that wars are probable in order -- to reach our conclusion that military force is but a proper insurance, it becomes desirable to prove our assumption. We have two great classes of men who feel that war can be abolished, both dreamers varying rather more in methods than in their danger to the nation, and both classes having certain elemental truths as a foundation upon which they base widely-distorted theories; theories as different as are the entirely opposite classes of men belonging to each school. We refer to the socialists and the pacifists. Many writers ignore the doctrine of the socialist as ridiculous anarchistic rot, which is the proper designation of the most widely circulated publications of this class. Yet these are writings whose effect is too great to permit their being entirely ignored by those who have the interests of their nation at heart. It is not because the arguments of the socialist will bear investigation and thought, but because their writings are circulated among men who are sufficiently well educated to read, but not learned enough to refute the incorrect statements or todiscern the fallacies which the socialist sets forth. Thus the socialist parasite lives by distributing his skillfully worded writings among those sufficiently ignorant to purchase and read the work, but unable to comprehend the viciousness of the thought. The socialist argues that war is for capital alone; that the working man does the fighting, bears the brunt of the loss, and gains nothing; while the capitalist does no fighting, suffers no loss, but gains all that is gained in the war. As a means of preventing the wars which they oppose so bitterly, the socialist suggests that the working man refuse to fight at what the...