Who provides the profits these nice little profits of 20, 100,
300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them in taxation. We paid the bankers
their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to
the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers
control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then
all of us the people got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The
bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went
to par and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.
If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the
battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a
tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have
visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000
destroyed men men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able
chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the
living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those
who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices
and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were
made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the
day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely
changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of
killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another
"about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without]
mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't
need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or
"Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are
eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about
In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are
in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside
the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys
don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in
good shape; mentally, they are gone.
There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are
coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of
that excitement the young boys couldn't stand it.
That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead they have paid
their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded they
are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too they paid
with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to
don the uniform of Uncle Sam on which a profit had been made. They paid another
part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their
jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches
where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept
in the mud and the cold and in the rain with the moans and shrieks of the dying for
a horrible lullaby.
But don't forget the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents
Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system,
and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in
many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as
$1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we
captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share at least, they were supposed
to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money
and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't
bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.
Napoleon once said,
"All men are enamored of decorations...they positively hunger for
So by developing the Napoleonic system the medal business
the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be
decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor
was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued
until the Spanish-American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept
conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it.
With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the
Germans. God is on our side...it is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the
allies...to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to
make people war conscious and murder conscious.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die.
This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world
safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going
and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they
might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the
ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United
States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to
make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones
behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get
it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed.
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a
laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to
support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we
made him pay what amounted to accident insurance something the employer pays for in
an enlightened state and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month
Then, the most crowning insolence of all he was virtually
blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy
Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.
We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back
when they came back from the war and couldn't find work at $84 and $86. And
the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays
too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At
nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in
their beds and tossed sleeplessly his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters,
his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind
broken, they suffered too as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and
they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers
and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty
Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus
of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.
And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken
and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.