Jimmie Higgins eBook

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!

IV

As a result of this ferment among the workers, the local had doubled its membership, and was holding soap-box meetings on a corner off Main Street on two evenings every week.  The plans for the weekly paper, however, still hung fire.  Comrade Dr. Service had lost his two brothers-in-law, one in the battle of Mons, and the other in the first frightful gas-attack at Ypres, where whole regiments of men were caught unprepared and died in awful torments.  Also two of his wife’s cousins had paid the price—­one was blind, and the other a prisoner at Ruhleben, the worst fate of all.  So Dr. Service made one last indignant speech in the local, and took his five hundred dollars to start a chapter of the Red Cross!

But now the Germans and the war-haters in the local were asking themselves, was Socialism to languish in the city of the Empire Machine Shops, just because one rich man with an English wife had proved a renegade?  Such a question answered itself!  The work of collecting subscription lists was taken up more vigorously than ever; and already more than half the lost five hundred had been made up, when one evening John Meissner came home with a most amazing story.

It was his custom to stop at Sandkuh’s for one glass of beer on his way home in the evening; and when anybody in the saloon got to arguing about the war, he would take his chance to put in a little propaganda.  This time he had made a regular speech, declaring that the workers would soon put an end to the munition-business; and a fellow had got to talking with him, asking him all sorts of questions about himself, and about the local.  How many members did it have?  How many of them felt as Meissner did?  What were they doing about it?  Pretty soon the man had drawn Meissner to a table in the back part of the place, asking about the proposed paper, and what its policy was to be; also about the unions in the city, and their policy, and the personalities of the leaders.

The man had said he was a Socialist, but Meissner did not believe him.  Meissner thought he must be some kind of union organizer.  There had been talk of various unions making an effort to break into the domain of old man Granitch; and, of course, there was always the I. W. W. trying to break in everywhere with its programme of the “one big union”.