to say that one imperialist is guilty and that another is blameless, to say that some imperialists were the aggressors and that others were on the defensive. All such assertions are made only in order to fool the workers. In actual fact, the Powers had all begun with aggressions upon the lesser peoples in whose lands they established their colonies; they all entertained designs of world-wide plunder; in every land alike the capitalists hoped to subject the whole world to the financial capital of their own country.
Once it had started, the war could not fail to be a world war. The reason is plain. Almost all the world had been partitioned among the “Great Powers,” and the Powers were intimately connected by the ties of a world-wide economic system. It is not surprising, therefore, that the war should involve all countries, should affect both hemispheres.
Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Montenegro, Japan, the United States, China, and a dozen petty States,