hought and energy--and be content to let their
neighbors alone.

2. _The Workers' Business_

The mere fact that the workers are so busy with the routine of daily
life is in itself a guarantee that they will mind their own business.
The average worker is engaged, outside of working hours, with the duties
of a family. His wife, if she has children, is thus employed for the
greater portion of her time. Both are far too preoccupied to interfere
with the like acts of other workers in some other portion of the world.
Furthermore, their preoccupation with these necessary tasks gives them
sympathy with those similarly at work elsewhere.

The plain people of any country are ready to exercise even more than an
ordinary amount of forbearance and patience rather than to be involved
in warfare, which wipes out in a fortnight the advantages gained through
years of patient industry.

The workers have no more to gain from empire building than they have
from war making, but they pay the price of both. Empire building and war
making are Siamese twins. They are so intimately bound together that
they cannot live apart. The empire builder--engaged in conquering and
appropriating territory and in subjugating peoples--must have not only
the force necessary to set up the empire, but also the force requisite
to maintain it. Battleships and army corps are as essential to empires
as mortar is to a brick wall. They are the expression of the organized
might by which the empire is held together.

The plain people are the bricks which the imperial class uses to build
into a wall about the empire. They are the mortar also, for they man the
ships and fill up the gaps in the infantry ranks and the losses in the
machine gun corps. They are the body of the empire as the rulers are its
guiding spirit.

When ships are required to carry the surplus wealth of the ruling class
into foreign markets, the workers build them. When surplus is needed to
be utilized in taking advantage of some particularly attractive
investment opportunity the workers create it. They lay down the keels of
the fighting ships, and their sons aim and fire the guns. They are
drafted into the army in time of war and their bodies are fed to the
cannon which other workers in other countries, or perhaps in the same
country, have made for just such purposes. The workers are the warp and
woof of empire, yet they are not the gainers by it. Quite the contrary,
they are merely the means