REVOLUTION

“The present is enough for common souls,
Who, never looking forward, are indeed
Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age
Are petrified for ever.”

I received a letter the other day.  It was from a man in Arizona.  It began, “Dear Comrade.”  It ended, “Yours for the Revolution.”  I replied to the letter, and my letter began, “Dear Comrade.”  It ended, “Yours for the Revolution.”  In the United States there are 400,000 men, of men and women nearly 1,000,000, who begin their letters “Dear Comrade,” and end them “Yours for the Revolution.”  In Germany there are 3,000,000 men who begin their letters “Dear Comrade” and end them “Yours for the Revolution”; in France, 1,000,000 men; in Austria, 800,000 men; in Belgium, 300,000 men; in Italy, 250,000 men; in England, 100,000 men; in Switzerland, 100,000 men; in Denmark, 55,000 men; in Sweden, 50,000 men; in Holland, 40,000 men; in Spain, 30,000 men—­comrades all, and revolutionists.

These are numbers which dwarf the grand armies of Napoleon and Xerxes.  But they are numbers not of conquest and maintenance of the established order, but of conquest and revolution.  They compose, when the roll is called, an army of 7,000,000 men, who, in accordance with the conditions of to-day, are fighting with all their might for the conquest of the wealth of the world and for the complete overthrow of existing society.

There has never been anything like this revolution in the history of the world.  There is nothing analogous between it and the American Revolution or the French Revolution.  It is unique, colossal.  Other revolutions compare with it as asteroids compare with the sun.  It is alone of its kind, the first world-revolution in a world whose history is replete with revolutions.  And not only this, for it is the first organized movement of men to become a world movement, limited only by the limits of the planet.

This revolution is unlike all other revolutions in many respects.  It is not sporadic.  It is not a flame of popular discontent, arising in a day and dying down in a day.  It is older than the present generation.  It has a history and traditions, and a martyr-roll only less extensive possibly than the martyr-roll of Christianity.  It has also a literature a myriad times more imposing, scientific, and scholarly than the literature of any previous revolution.

They call themselves “comrades,” these men, comrades in the socialist revolution.  Nor is the word empty and meaningless, coined of mere lip service.  It knits men together as brothers, as men should be knit together who stand shoulder to shoulder under the red banner of revolt.  This red banner, by the way, symbolizes the brotherhood of man, and does not symbolize the incendiarism that instantly connects itself with the red banner in the affrighted bourgeois mind.  The comradeship of