Junkerism is the final expression of reaction,
organized to the highest efficiency. The war against the Junkers marks
the consummation of a long struggle for human liberty in all lands,
symbolizes the real cleavage dividing the world. As in the French
Revolution and the wars that followed it, the true significance of this
war is social. But today the Russian Revolution sounds the keynote.
Revolutions tend to express the extremes of the philosophies of their
times--human desires, discontents, and passions that cannot be organized.
The French Revolution was a struggle for political freedom; the
underlying issue of the present war is economic freedom--without which
political freedom is of no account. It will not, therefore, suffice
merely to crush the Junkers, and with them militarism and autocracy.
Unless, as the fruit of this appalling bloodshed and suffering, the
democracies achieve economic freedom, the war will have been fought in
vain. More revolutions, wastage and bloodshed will follow, the world
will be reduced to absolute chaos unless, in the more advanced
democracies, an intelligent social order tending to remove the causes
of injustice and discontent can be devised and ready for inauguration.
This new social order depends, in turn, upon a world order of mutually
helpful, free peoples, a league of Nations.--If the world is to be made
safe for democracy, this democratic plan must be ready for the day when
the German Junker is beaten and peace is declared.
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