numerous dead would be an
impossibility.

When to all this is added the frightful disturbances and devastations,
produced to-day by a European _war on the economic-field_, there is no
exaggeration in the saying: "_the next war is the last war_." The number
of bankruptcies will be unparalleled; export stops--and thereby
thousands of factories are condemned to idleness; the supply of food
ceases--and thereby the prices of the means of life rise enormously. The
number of families whose breadwinner is in the field runs up into the
millions, and most of them must be supported. Whence shall the means
come for all that?

The political and military state of Europe has taken a development that
cannot choose but end in a catastrophe, which will drag capitalist
society down to its ruin. Having reached the height of its development,
it produces conditions that end with rendering its own existence
impossible; it digs its own grave; it slays itself with the identical
means that itself, as the most revolutionary of all previous social
systems, has called into life.

Gradually a large portion of our municipalities are arriving at a
desperate pass: they hardly know how to meet the increasing demands upon
themselves. It is more particularly upon our rapidly growing large
cities, and upon the localities situated in industrial districts, that
the quickened increase of population makes a mass of demands, which the
generally poor communities can come up to only by raising taxes and
incurring debts. The budgets leap upward from year to year for school
buildings, and street paving, for lighting, draining and water works;
for sanitary, public and educational purposes; for the police and the
administration. At the same time, the favorably situated minority makes
the most expensive demands upon the community. It demands higher
institutions of education, theatres, the opening of particularly fine
city quarters with lighting, pavement, etc., to match. However justly
the majority may complain of the preference, it lies in the very nature
of modern affairs. The minority has the power and uses it to satisfy its
social wants as much as possible at the expense of the collectivity. In
and of themselves nothing can be said against these heightened social
wants: they denote progress; the fault is only that their satisfaction
falls mainly to the lot of the property classes, while all others should
share them. A further evil lies in that often the adminis