In the initiatory programme of our Association we stated: “It 
was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance 
to their criminal folly by the working classes of England that saved 
the West of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous 
crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the 
other side of the Atlantic.”* Your turn has now come to stop a 
war, the clearest result of which would be, for an indefinite 
period, to hurl back the ascendant movement of the working class 
on both sides of the Atlantic. 

We need hardly tell you that there exist European powers 
anxiously bent upon hurrying the United States into a war with 
England. A glan¢e at commercial statistics will show that the 
Russian export of raw produce, and Russia has nothing else to 
export, was rapidly giving way before American competition, when 
the civil war suddenly turned the scales. To convert the American 
ploughshares into swords would just now rescue from impending 
bankruptcy that despotic power which your republican statesmen 
have, in their wisdom, chosen for their confidential adviser. But 
quite apart from the particular interests of this or that govern- 
ment, is it not the general interest of our common oppressors to 
turn our fast-growing international cooperation into an inter- 
necine war? 

In a congratulatory address to Mr. Lincoln on his re-election as 
president, we expressed our conviction that the American civil war 

would prove of as great import to the advancement of the working 
class as the American war of independence had proved to that of 
the middle class.* And, in point of fact, the victorious termination 
of the anti-slavery war has opened a new epoch in the annals of 
the working class. In the States themselves, an independent 
working-class movement, looked upon with an evil eye by your old 
parties and their professional politicians, has since that date 
sprung into life. To fructify it wants years of peace. To crush it, a 
war between the United States and England is wanted. 

The next palpable effect of the civil war was, of course, to 
deteriorate the position of the American workman. In the United 
States, as in Europe, the monster incubus of a national debt was 
shifted from hand to hand, to settle down on the shoulders of the 
working class. The prices of necessaries, says one of your 
statesmen, have since 1860 risen 78 per cent, while the wages of 
unskilled labour rose 50 per cent, those of skilled labour 60 per 
cent only. “Pauperism,” he complains, “grows now in America 
faster than population.” Moreover, the sufferings of the working 
classes set off as a foil the new-fangled luxury of financial 
aristocrats, shoddy aristocrats,’’ and similar vermin bred by wars. 
Yet for all this the civil war did compensate by freeing the slave 
and the consequent moral impetus it gave to your own class 
movement. A second war, not hallowed by a sublime purpose and a 
great social necessity, but of the Old World’s type, would forge 
chains for the free labourer instead of tearing: asunder those of 
the slave. The accumulated misery left in its track would afford 
your capitalists at once the motive and the means to divorce the 
working class from its bold and just aspirations by the soulless 
sword of a standing army. 

On you, then, depends the glorious task to prove to the world 
that now at last the working classes are bestriding the scene of 
history no longer as servile retainers, but as independent actors, 
conscious of their own responsibility, and able to command peace 
where their would-be masters shout war. 

In the name of the General Council of the International 
Working Men’s Association, 

British nationality: R. Applegarth, carpenter’; 
M. J. Boon, engineer; J. Buckley, painter; J. Hales, 
elastic web-weaver; Harriet Law; B. Lucraft, chair- 

maker; J. Milner, tailor; G. Odger, shoemaker; 
J. Ross, bootcloser; B. Shaw, painter; Cowell Step- 
ney; J. Warren, trunk-maker; J. Weston, handrail- 
maker. French nationality: E. Dupont, instrument- 
maker; Jules Johannard, lithographer; Paul Lafar- 
gue. German nationality: G. Eccarius, tailor; F. Les- 
sner, tailor; W. Limburg, shoemaker; Marx, Karl. 
Swiss nationality: H. Jung, watchmaker; A. Müller, 
watchmaker. Belgian nationality: M. Bernard, 
painter. Danish nationality: J. Cohn, cigar-maker. 
Polish nationality: Zabicki, compositor. 

B. Lucraft, Chairman 
Cowell Stepney, Treasurer 
J. George Eccarius, General Secretary 

London, May 12th, 1869