So all that summer and autumn, while Jimmie Higgins
slaved in the fields, getting in his country’s
wheat-crop, and then his country’s corn crop,
there was a song of joy and awakening excitement in
his soul. Far over the seas men of his own kind
were getting the reins of power into their hands,
for the first time in the history of the world.
It could not be long before here in America the workers
would learn this wonderful lesson, would thrill to
the idea that freedom and plenty might really be their
portion.
JIMMIE HIGGINS TURNS BOLSHEVIK
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.
