millions are killing or get killed in the trenches, while our streets are being rapidly filled with one-legged or one-armed, blind, and otherwise mutilated human beings, while our hospitals and our asylums are full of physical and mental wrecks, while mourning reigns in tens of thousands of homes, the capitalist class is coining money faster than it can, and fortunes are being built up as in the days of the Indian Nabobs or the first Spanish adventurers in Mexico and Peru. As for neutral countries, it is sufficient to recall that according to a recent report, the "national" wealth of the United States has increased during the last two years by something like £800,000,000, and that Japan (a neutral country in spite of the war) has been buying up her securities in Europe, and is now practically free from foreign indebtedness, to realise the blood-sodden ground of Europe has for them, too, produced a rich harvest.
The capitalist class has enormously profited by the war. Can we wonder that it shows no haste in ending it? Why should it? It makes money, it does not suffer from the rising cost of living, and its personal losses on the battlefields are both absolutely and proportionately insignificant in comparison with those sustained by the working class. In the initial stages of the war some of us thought that at least the neutrals would revolt against the massacre and the attending restrictions, in various directions, imposed upon them by the belligerents. Some inconvenience, no doubt, they suffer, but can they be compared with the profits their capitalist classes are making as providers of arms and ammunition, of foodstuffs, of raw material and shipping? Hence the paradox: the world is perishing in a sea of blood, but capitalism which could stop the catastrophe if it wished allows it to go on. This is the true paradox of capitalism!
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