of Japan addressed the following message to the
revolutionists of Russia: "Dear Comrades--Your government and ours have
recently plunged into war to carry out their imperialistic tendencies,
but for us socialists there are no boundaries, race, country, or
nationality. We are comrades, brothers, and sisters, and have no reason
to fight. Your enemies are not the Japanese people, but our militarism
and so-called patriotism. Patriotism and militarism are our mutual
enemies."

In January 1905, throughout the United States the socialists held
mass-meetings to express their sympathy for their struggling comrades,
the revolutionists of Russia, and, more to the point, to furnish the
sinews of war by collecting money and cabling it to the Russian leaders.
The fact of this call for money, and the ready response, and the very
wording of the call, make a striking and practical demonstration of the
international solidarity of this world-revolution:

"Whatever may be the immediate results of the present revolt in Russia,
the socialist propaganda in that country has received from it an impetus
unparalleled in the history of modern class wars. The heroic battle for
freedom is being fought almost exclusively by the Russian working-class
under the intellectual leadership of Russian socialists, thus once more
demonstrating the fact that the class-conscious working-men have become
the vanguard of all liberating movements of modern times."

Here are 7,000,000 comrades in an organized, international, world-wide,
revolutionary movement. Here is a tremendous human force. It must be
reckoned with. Here is power. And here is romance--romance so colossal
that it seems to be beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. These
revolutionists are swayed by great passion. They have a keen sense of
personal right, much of reverence for humanity, but little reverence, if
any at all, for the rule of the dead. They refuse to be ruled by the
dead. To the bourgeois mind their unbelief in the dominant conventions
of the established order is startling. They laugh to scorn the sweet
ideals and dear moralities of bourgeois society. They intend to destroy
bourgeois society with most of its sweet ideals and dear moralities, and
chiefest among these are those that group themselves under such heads as
private ownership of capital, survival of the fittest, and
patriotism--even patriotism.

Such an army of revolution, 7,000,000 strong, is a thing to make ruler