nment is compelled to deal with a labor movement
that is strong enough to consider and to decide important matters of
foreign policy. The workers of Italy have the upper hand. In
Czecho-Slovakia, in Bulgaria, in Germany and in the smaller and neutral
countries the workers are making their voices heard in opposition to any
restoration of the capitalist system; while they busy themselves with
the task of creating the framework of a new society.

4. _The Challenge_

This is the challenge of the workers of Europe to the capitalist system.
The workers are not satisfied; they are questioning. They mean to have
the best that life has to give, and they are convinced that the
capitalist system has denied it to them.

The world has had more than a century of capitalism. The workers have
had ample opportunity to see the system at work. The people of all the
great capitalist countries--the common people--have borne the burdens
and felt the crushing weight of capitalism--in its enslavement of little
children; in its underpaying of women; in long hours of unremitting,
monotonous toil; in the dreadful housing; in the starvation wages; in
unemployment; in misery. The capitalist system has had a trial and it is
upon the workers that the system has been tried out.

During this experiment, the workers of the world have been compelled to
accept poverty, unemployment and war.

These terrible scourges have afflicted the capitalist world, and it is
the workers and their families that have borne them in their own
persons. In those countries where the capitalist system is the oldest,
the workers have suffered the longest. The essence of capitalism is the
exploitation of one man by another man, and the longer this exploitation
is practiced the more skillful and effective does the master class
become in its manipulation.

The workers look before them along the path of capitalist imperialism
that is now being followed by the nations that are in the lead of the
capitalist world. There they see no promise save the same exploitation,
the same poverty, the same inequality and the same wars over the
commercial rivalries of the imperial nations.

The workers of Europe have come to the conclusion that the world should
belong to those who build it; that the good things of life should be the
property of those who produce them. They see only one course open before
them--to declare that those who will not work, shall not eat.

The right of self-de