therefore becomes able at some time to impose its
will upon the dominating military authority. And this time arrives as
soon as the mass of the people--country and city workers and
farmers--has the will. At this point the army of the classes becomes
the army of the masses, the machine refuses to do the work, militarism
goes under in the dialectic of its own development. What the bourgeois
democrats of 1848 could not accomplish, just because they were
bourgeois and not proletarian, namely the endowment of the laboring
masses with a will, the content of which corresponded with their class
condition, socialism will certainly accomplish. And that means the
destruction of militarism and with it of all standing armies
absolutely and entirely.

That is the moral of our history of modern infantry. The second moral
which brings us back to Herr Duehring is that the entire organization
and methods of warfare of modern armies and, with them, victory and
defeat, are dependent upon material things, that is upon economic
conditions, upon soldier material and upon weapon material and
therefore upon the quality of a population and upon technique. Only a
hunting people like the Americans could rediscover the sharpshooter.
Now the Yankees of the old States have, from purely economic causes,
become transformed into farmers, industrialists, sailors and
merchants, who no longer shoot in the primeval forests and on that
account have become all the more successful in the field of
speculation where they have developed into colossal appropriators.
Only a Revolution like the French which emancipated the burghers and
still more the peasants could discover the simultaneously massed
armies and free advance by which they overcame the stiff old line
formation, the military product of the absolutism against which they
fought. And as for the advances in technique as soon as they were
applicable and were applied, forthwith changes, nay revolutions, in
the methods of warfare were at once made, often against the will of
the military leaders as we have seen over and over again to be the
case. A diligent subaltern could explain to Herr Duehring how at the
present day the making of war is dependent upon the productivity and
means of communication of the back country as well as of the theatre
of war. In short, economic conditions and means of power are always
the things which help "force" to victory, and without them "force"
comes to an end. So that he who w