CHAPTER XV
JIMMIE HIGGINS TURNS BOLSHEVIK
I
Winter was coming, and the farm-workers moved to the cities; but
this year they did not go as down-and-out-o'-works--they went, each
man a little kink. Jimmie wandered into the city of Ironton, and got
himself a job in a big automobile shop at eight dollars a day, and
set to work agitating for ten dollars. It was not that he had any
need of the extra two dollars, of course, but merely because his
first principle in life was to make trouble for the profit-system.
The capitalist papers of this middle-Western metropolis were
furiously denouncing working-men who struck "against their country"
in war-time; Jimmie, on the other hand, denounced those who used
"country" as camouflage for "boss" and made the war a pretext to
deprive labour of its most precious right.
There was a Socialist local in Ironton, still active and determined
in spite of the fact that its office had been raided by the police,
and most of the party's papers and magazines barred from the mails.
You could always get leaflets printed, however; and if you could no
longer denounce the war directly, you could jeer at England's
exhibition of "democracy" in Ireland, you could point to the profits
of the profiteers, and demand conscription of wealth along with
conscription of manhood. Some American Socialists became almost as
subtle as that German rebel of pre-war days, who, desiring to
lampoon the Kaiser, wrote an account of the life of the Roman
Emperor Agricola, reciting his vanities and insane extravagances.
Late in the autumn came an event which should have troubed Jimmie
Higgins more deeply than it did. Along the Izonzo river the Italian
armies were facing the Austrians, their hereditary enemies; they
were at the end of a long, exhaustive, and for the most part
unsuccessful campaign, and the Italian Socialists at home were
carrying on precisely such a warfare against their own government as
Jimmie Higgins was carrying on in America. They were helped by the
Catholic intriguers, who hated the Italian government because it had
destroyed the temporal power of the Pope; they were helped by the
subtle and persistent efforts of Austrian agents in their country,
who spread rumours among Italian troops of the friendly intentions
of the Austrians, and of the imminence of a truce. These agents went
so far as to fake copies of the leading Italian newspapers, with
accounts of starvation and riots in the home cities, and the
shooting down of women and children. These papers were given out in
the Italian trenches, before a certain mountain-sector where the
Austrian troops had been fraternizing with the Italians; and then,
during the night, the Austrian troops were withdrawn, and picked
German "shock-troops" substituted, which attacked at dawn and drove
through the Italian lines, sweeping back the army along a
hundred-mile front, capturing some quarter of a million prisoners
and a couple of thousand cannon--practically all the Italians had.
That Jimmie Higgins did not pay more attention to this terrifying
incident was in part because he read it in the capitalist papers and
did not believe it; but mainly because his whole attention just now
was centred on Russia, where the proletariat was about to make its
bid for power. Now you would see how wars were to be ended and peace
restored to a distracted world!
The moderate Socialist government of Kerensky was pleading with the
capitalist masters of the Allied nations for a statement of their
peace terms, so that the workers of Russia might know what they were
fighting for. The Russian workers wanted a declaration in favour of
no annexations, no indemnities, and disarmament; on such terms they
would help fight the war, in spite of all the starvation and
suffering in distracted Russia. But the Allied statesmen would not
make any such declaration, and the Russian workers, backed by all
the Socialists of the world, declared that the reason was that these
Allied statesmen were waging an imperialist war--they did not intend
to stop fighting until they had taken vast territories from the
German powers, and exacted a ransom that would cripple Germany for a
generation. The Russian workers refused point-blank to fight for
such aims, and so in November came the second revolution, the
uprising of the Bolsheviki.
Almost their first action when they took possession of the palaces
and government archives was to publish to the world the secret
treaties which the rulers of England, France and Italy had made with
Russia. These treaties formed a complete justification for the
attitude of the Russian revolutionists--they showed that the Allied
imperialists had planned most shameless plundering; England was to
have the German colonies and Mesopotamia, France was to have German
territory to the Rhine, and Italy was to have the Adriatic coast,
and to divide Palestine and Syria with England and France.
And here was the most significant fact to Jimmie Higgins--these
enormously important revelations, the most important since the
beginning of the war, were practically suppressed by the capitalist
newspapers of America! First these papers printed a brief item--the
Bolsheviki had given out what they claimed were secret treaties, but
the genuineness of these documents was gravely doubted. Then they
published evasive and lying denials from the British, French and
Italian diplomats; and then they shut up! Not another word did you
read about those secret treaties; except for one or two American
newspapers with traditions of honour, the full text of those
treaties was given in the Socialist press alone! "And now," cried
Jimmie Higgins to the working men in his shop, "what do you think of
those wonderful allies of ours? What do you think of those Wall
Street newspapers of ours?" Could any working-man who had such facts
put before him fail to realize that Jimmie Higgins had a case, and a
most important work in the world to do, in spite of all his unreason
and his narrowness?
