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Saturday December 18, 1916
From The Masses: "Do You Believe in Patriotism?" Part II

In the March issue of The Masses, various Socialist writers responded to the question, "Do you believe in Patriotism?" Yesterday Hellraisers featured the answers to that question from two prominent Socialists women, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Sara Bard Field. Today's edition features the responses of John Sloan and Charles Erskine Scott Wood:

From John Sloan

If I had to love a country I could love no country but this, nor could I find a fitter one to hate.

I put Patriotism with the other isms,-Militarism, Anarchism, Capitalism, Individualism, Socialism, Dogmatism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Rheumatism (I had almost written Catechism), but I am answering your question. I hope that social progress will eliminate all isms-though in the case of Futurism we have a hard one to catch.

Patriotism licks the boot of capitalism and until the earth-worms get the latter's carcass, he will need patriots. As the wage system will never enable the people of any country to consume all their products with a profit to the owning class, foreign markets are a necessity to be fought for. Patriotism is a potent means of providing the fighters. Conscription is another powerful persuader and Our Country has both (see Dick military law passed by congress in 1903 and 1908).

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Monday March 6, 1916
From the International Socialist Review: Comrade Debs on the Fantines of Our Day

From this month's edition of the Review, Comrade Debs urges class solidarity and human compassion for the "girls, women who have walked the path of thorns and briers with bare and bleeding feet; who know the ways of agony and tears, and who move in melancholy procession as capitalist society's sacrificial offering to nameless and dishonored graves."

FANTINE IN OUR DAY

By EUGENE V. DEBS
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THE reader of "Les Miserables" can never forget the ill-starred Fantine, the mournful heroine of Hugo's immortal classic. The very name of Fantine, the gay, guileless, trusting girl, the innocent, betrayed, self-immolating young mother, the despoiled, bedraggled, hunted and holy martyr to motherhood, to the infinite love of her child, touches to tears and haunts the memory like a melancholy dream.

Jean Valjean, noblest of heroes, was possible only because of Fantine, sublimest of martyrs.

Fantine—child of poverty and starvation—the ruined girl, the abandoned mother, the hounded prostitute, remained to the very hour of her tragic death chaste as a virgin, spotless as a saint in the holy sanctuary of her own pure and undefiled soul. It was of such as Fantine that Heine wrote: "I have seen women on whose cheeks red vice was painted and in whose hearts dwelt heavenly purity."