Peace movement, and one of the earliest, has been a woman, the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, and it is held to be incredible that the wives and mothers of the people will use their power to support an institution which represents the most brutal method of destroying their husbands and sons. "The cause of woman," says Novikov, "is the cause of peace." "We pay the first cost on all human life," says Olive Schreiner.11
The anti-militarist, as things are at present, exposes himself not only to the penalty of imprisonment, but also to obloquy. He has virtually refused to take up arms in defence of his country; he has sinned against patriotism. This accusation has led to a counter-accusation directed against the very idea of patriotism. Here the writings of Tolstoy, with their poignant and searching appeals for the cause of humanity as against the cause of patriotism, have undoubtedly served the anti-militarists well, and wherever the war against war is being urged, even so far as Japan, Tolstoy has furnished some of its keenest weapons. Moreover, in so far as anti-militarism is advocated by the workers, they claim that international interests have already effaced and superseded the narrower interests of patriotism. In refusing to fight, the workers of a country are simply declaring their loyalty to fellow-workers on the other side of the frontier, a loyalty which has stronger claims on them, they hold, than any patriotism which simply means loyalty to capitalists;
geographical frontiers are giving place to economic frontiers, which now alone serve to separate enemies. And if, as seems probable, when the next attempt is made at a great European war, the order for mobilization is immediately followed in both countries by the declaration of a general strike, there will be nothing to say against such a declaration even from the standpoint of the narrowest patriotism, although there may be much to say on other grounds against the policy of the general strike.