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.
