While Ben Salmon was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane (a government hospital in Washington, D.C.) and quartered in Howard Hall, the ward for the criminally insane, he typed his justification for refusing to aid the military machine. The final document amounted to more than 130000 words covering 229 pages, and was presented to the Hospital staff to be used in assessing his sanity. Ben was an expert typist and typing up to 5000 words per day completed the document in about a month while on his "Liberty or Death" hunger strike. His major work contains a point-by-point refutation of so-called 'just war theory'.
Two helpful guides for reading Ben's Magnum Opus are: