III
On every street corner, in every meeting-room, in every spot where
the workers gathered at the noon hour, you would hear such
arguments; and you would find men listening to them--men who perhaps
had never listened to such arguments before. They would nod, and
their faces would become grim--yes, the people up on top must be a
rotten lot! Here in America, supposed to be a land of liberty and
all that--here they were just the same, they were crowding to the
trough to drink the blood that was poured out in Europe. Of course,
they covered their greed with a camouflage of sympathy for the
Allies; but did anybody believe that old man Granitch loved the
Russian government? Certainly nobody in Leesville did; they knew
that he was "getting his", and their hearts hardened with a grim
resolve to "get theirs".
At first they thought they were succeeding. Wages went up, almost
for the asking; never did the unskilled man have so much money in
his pocket, while the man who could pretend to any skill at all
found himself in the plutocratic class. But quickly men discovered
the worm in this luscious war-fruit; prices were going up almost as
fast as wages--in some places even faster. The sums you had to pay
to the landlord surpassed belief; a single working man would be
asked two or three dollars a week for twelve hours' use of a
mattress and blanket, which in the old days he might have got for
fifty cents. Food was scarce and of poor quality; before long you
found yourself being asked to pay six cents for a hunk of pie or a
cup of coffee--and then seven cents, and then ten. If you kicked,
the proprietor would tell you a long tale about what he had to pay
for rent and labour and supplies; and you could not deny that he was
probably right. About the only thing that did not go up was a
postage-stamp; and the Socialist would point to this and explain
that the Post Office was run by Uncle Sam, instead of by Abel
Granitch!
Every rise in price was a fresh stick of fuel for the Socialist
machine, and gave new power to their propaganda of "Starve the War
and Feed America!" The Socialist saw millions of tons of goods being
loaded into steamships and sent to Europe to be destroyed in war; he
saw the workers of Europe becoming enslaved by a bonded debt to a
class of parasites in America, he saw America being drawn closer and
closer to the abyss of the strife. The Socialist loved no part of
this process. He clamoured for an embargo--not merely on munitions,
but on food and everything, until the war-lords of Europe came to
their senses. He urged the workers to strike, and thus force the
politicians to declare the embargo.
Especially, of course, he urged this if he were a German or an
Austrian, a Hungarian or a Bohemian. The latter were subject races,
but they could not in these early days see beyond the fact that
their fathers and brothers and cousins were being killed by the
shells that were made in the Empire Machine Shops. With them stood
also the Jews, who hated the Russian government so bitterly that
nothing else mattered; also the Irish, whose first idea in life was
to pay back John Bull for his sins of several centuries, and whose
second idea was to take part in any sort of shivaree that was going.
It was quite bewildering to Jimmie Higgins; he had wrestled with
Catholics of several nations and got nothing but hard words for his
pains, but now all of a sudden Tom Callahan of the "Buffeteria" and
Pat Grogan of the grocery on the corner made the discovery that
maybe he was not such a fool after all!
