00 men--comrades all, and
revolutionists.

These are numbers which dwarf the grand armies of Napoleon and Xerxes.
But they are numbers not of conquest and maintenance of the established
order, but of conquest and revolution. They compose, when the roll is
called, an army of 7,000,000 men, who, in accordance with the conditions
of to-day, are fighting with all their might for the conquest of the
wealth of the world and for the complete overthrow of existing society.

There has never been anything like this revolution in the history of the
world. There is nothing analogous between it and the American Revolution
or the French Revolution. It is unique, colossal. Other revolutions
compare with it as asteroids compare with the sun. It is alone of its
kind, the first world-revolution in a world whose history is replete with
revolutions. And not only this, for it is the first organized movement
of men to become a world movement, limited only by the limits of the
planet.

This revolution is unlike all other revolutions in many respects. It is
not sporadic. It is not a flame of popular discontent, arising in a day
and dying down in a day. It is older than the present generation. It
has a history and traditions, and a martyr-roll only less extensive
possibly than the martyr-roll of Christianity. It has also a literature
a myriad times more imposing, scientific, and scholarly than the
literature of any previous revolution.

They call themselves "comrades," these men, comrades in the socialist
revolution. Nor is the word empty and meaningless, coined of mere lip
service. It knits men together as brothers, as men should be knit
together who stand shoulder to shoulder under the red banner of revolt.
This red banner, by the way, symbolizes the brotherhood of man, and does
not symbolize the incendiarism that instantly connects itself with the
red banner in the affrighted bourgeois mind. The comradeship of the
revolutionists is alive and warm. It passes over geographical lines,
transcends race prejudice, and has even proved itself mightier than the
Fourth of July, spread-eagle Americanism of our forefathers. The French
socialist working-men and the German socialist working-men forget Alsace
and Lorraine, and, when war threatens, pass resolutions declaring that as
working-men and comrades they have no quarrel with each other. Only the
other day, when Japan and Russia sprang at each other's throats, the
revolutionists