The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-12-16
PEACE AND THE BROTHERS.

When the first peace announce ments reached Wall Street, they did not arrive to be welcomed with un- stinted joy. They did not, because they were tidings of good will to- wards men. excite the hearts of those throngs who had revelled in the glory of the acme of America $ financial life.
 Indeed no; panic reigned supreme. Men were seized with sudden fear; terror clutched with icy grip the hearts of the spectators. The word peace was synonimOus with every thing fearful, and when it was real ized that the sensational news was an actuality and that peace propo- sals had actually been made, the fear and the terror and the panic caused a wild hell upon Wall street.
 While Europe was weltering in the ichor of the battlefields, and a suffering beyond the power of words to tell about, and angush beyond the power of tears to paint had over whelmed the hearts of the stricken people, the servants of the Money God revelled in an untold wealth and rioted in an unusual joy that comes from the power to spend, and to orgy in the squandering of sud- denly gotten gains.
 Reason and thrift and temperance gave way to the will of widest pleasure. The smiles of the pur- chaseable fair, the glitter of the sumptuous suppers, the gaud of the of barbaric jewelry, the bouquet of the rarest wines: these and more, became the order of the night.
 The riches and resources of science and art and labor and nature Ill every cline and every soil were ra- wished to afford a pleasure to the epicures of wealth who rose to for tune from the selling of war sup plies, war stocks and war muni- tions.
 The successful spectators whose bank account rose a notch for every wounded soldier and for every indi- vidual death, and scared to un- dreamt of heights at every new atro- city and every blood-red carnage, felt no taint of human blood upon their profits. and no odor of befoul- ed humanity from their mountainous gains. To them the money came as an unsual opportunity to enrichment and power and enjoyment, and that it was builded upon human tears, cemented with human blood and concreted with human bones and flesh mattered not at all.
 So when that terrible word peace comes with it's significance to their ears, it has such a dreadful sound the wars continuance could never bring. It darkens the banquetting room, it strikes the guests with pa pic, it defles the silken beauty and clothes her in the leprosy of rags, 1t reduces the pleasure seeker to a sot. and brings vision of an unclean world of poverty and vice and crime and wretchedness before those who had even then been planning the nights riot of maddening pleasure and an ecstacy of joys.
 That's why on Wall street panic reigned. That is why pandemonium broke loose and the frenzy of finance frantically seized the souls of excited men. That is why terror, that had lain still like benumbed viper while profits thrilled the minds and bodies with it's paradise of pleasure, now comes to life to sting with its ve- nomed dart the brains of these har- ried ones.
 So it is that the very name that should serve to throw the universe into an excitation of happiness. brings with it all the ominous fears and dreads and panics and terrors that one might have expected the wars continuance might have brought. Is it possible to conceive a more complete rebuttal of our claims to civilization. when the prospects of a world at peace and a world where the armed millions would no longer meet in deadly combat other armed millions. throws the industri- al and financial fabric into terror, |