c. Hailing
from all points of the compass, and holding the most conflicting ideas,
they share only one article of faith, that of the war against war. This
common creed suffices to bring them into closer association than the
associations they had with their friends of yesterday, with their
brothers by blood, by religion, or by profession.[23] Thus did Christ
pass to and fro among the men of Judea, detaching those who believed in
him from their families, from their class, from all their past life.--In
the United States, as in Europe, young men are far less possessed with
the war spirit than their elders. A striking example comes from Columbia
University. Here, while the professors were conferring on General Joffre
the degree of doctor of literature, the students assembled to pass a
unanimous resolution against answering the call of military
conscription.[24] This exposed the voters to the penalty of
imprisonment. For they manage things with a heavy hand in the classic
land of liberty. Many American citizens have been thrown into gaol, and
others, we are informed, have been immured in lunatic asylums, for
having expressed their disapproval of the war. The recruiting sergeants
go wherever they please, even forcing their way into meetings of the
workers and maltreating all who resist them.[25] Under the rubric A
Week's War "The Masses" records all the brutalities, all the blows,
wounds, and murders, to which the war has already led in America. We may
well ask to what extremes of violence these antipacifist repressions
will some day be carried. The alleged freedom of speech in the United
States would appear to be pure humbug. "In actual fact," exclaims Max
Eastman, "freedom of speech has never existed." It is by law
established. "But in practice there reigns a contempt for law, to the
advantage of the strong and to the detriment of the weak." We have long
known this through the revelations of the Italian and Russian socialist
press, in connection with the scandalous sentences passed on working
men. Do pacifists give trouble? They are arrested as anarchists! Does a
periodical refuse to bow to the opinion of the state? It is suppressed
without parley; or sometimes, by a more refined procedure, it is
prosecuted for obscenity![26] And so on.

Max Eastman's chief collaborator, John Reed, endeavours to throw light
on the preponderating role played by American capitalism in the war. In
an article which adopts as title that of Norman