"Local Rochester, C. M. O'Brien, "580 St. Paul St., Rochester, N. Y.: "Dear Comrade.--I am pleased to announce the publication of two vital documents in pamphlet form, namely, 'The Manifesto Communist International,' issued 1919 by the Soviets of Russia at Moscow to the toiling masses of the world. This is undoubtedly the greatest declaration ever issued from any working class tribunal since the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels ... the second is 'The Constitution World's First Socialist Republic.... [Signed] "Edwin Firth, "Literature Dept."
But Hillquit, the great "expert on Socialism," missed reading this "vital" manifesto all the summer of 1919, when the Socialist papers were full of it; and yet, by some wild chance, himself composed a close echo of it!
The cowardly "Reds," as we have seen, want a violent revolution and constantly preach it to the discontented as boldly and openly as they dare. But they want America's workingmen to take all the risk and do all the work, and they go on with their frantic agitation in the hope that American labor will some day organize a great "general strike" and try to turn it into a revolution to overthrow the United States Government. Naturally, therefore, the Socialists get excited whenever any great labor strike is on, and they stand as tempters whispering the word "revolution" into the ears of the strikers. Sometimes they get their suggestion that the strike be turned into a revolution before the strikers' minds by a hypocritical pretense that they are afraid that what they so much long for is likely to happen. Debs, the Socialist Party's presidential standard-bearer, is a past master in this art of suggestion through a pretense of feeling concern, and during the steel strike of 1919 he even tried to "start
something" of this kind from behind the bars of his jail. Thus in the form of an interview, sent as a "special to the 'New York Times,'" which