There came rain and snow and blizzards, but the rail-road
construction stopped for nothing. It went on in
three shifts, day and night; for half the world was
clamouring for the means to blow itself up, and the
other half must work like the devil to furnish the
means. At least that was the way the matter presented
itself to Jimmie Higgins, who took it as a personal
affront the way this diabolical war kept pursuing
him. He had fled into the country from it, bringing
his little family to a tenant-house on an obscure,
worn-out farm, several miles from the nearest town;
but here all of a sudden came a gang of Dagoes with
picks and shovels. They lifted up and set to
one side the chicken-house where Lizzie kept her eleven
hens and one rooster, and the pig-sty where one little
hog gobbled up their table-scraps; and two days later
came a huge machine, driven by steam, creeping on
a track, picking up rails and ties from a car behind
it, swinging them round and laying them in front of
it, and then rolling ahead over the bed it had made.
So the railroad just literally walked out into the
country, and before long whole train-loads of cement
and sand and corrugated iron walls and roofing came
rattling and banging past the Higgins’s back-door.
Day and night this continued; and a little way beyond
they knew that a two-mile square of scrubby waste
was being laid out with roads and tracks and little
squat buildings, set far apart from each other.
In a few months the frightened family would lie awake
at night and listen to trains rattling past, coming
out from the explosives plant, piled to the tops with
loads of trinitrotoluol, and such unpronounceable
instruments of murder and destruction. And this
was the fate which capitalism had handed out to an
ardent anti-militarist, a propagandist of international
fraternity!
Jimmie Higgins went into the Socialist local now and
then, to pay his dues and to refresh his soul on pacifist
speeches. Just before Christmas the President
of the United States wrote a letter to all the warring
nations pleading with them to end the strife; intimating
that all the belligerents were on a par as to badness,
and stating explicitly that America had nothing to
do with their struggle. This, of course, brought
intense satisfaction to the members of Local Leesville
of the Socialist party; it was what they had been
proclaiming for two years and four months! They
had never expected to have a capitalist President
in agreement with them, but when the opportunity came,
they made the most of it; clamouring that the capitalist
President should go farther—should back
up his words by actions. If the warring nations
would not make peace, let America at least clear her
skirts by declaring an embargo, refusing to furnish
them with the means of self-destruction!
