Poor Jimmie couldn't put up much of a defence: he was cowed, for once. He could only say that he had had no evil intention--he had merely been agitating against the trade in munitions--a wicked thing--
“Wicked?” broke in the Comrade Doctor. “The thing upon which the freedom of mankind depends!”
“W--what?” exclaimed Jimmie; for these words sounded to him like sheer lunacy.
The other explained. “A nation that means to destroy its neighbours sets to work and puts all its energies into making guns and shells. The free peoples of the world won't follow suit--you can't persuade them to do it, because they don't believe in war, they can't realize that their neighbours intend to make war. So, when they are attacked their only chance for life is to go out into the open market and buy the means of defence. And you propose to deprive them of that right--to betray them, to throw them under the hoofs of the war-monster! You, who call yourself a believer in justice, make yourself a tool of such a conspiracy! You take German money--”
“I never took no German money!” cried Jimmie, wildly.
“But I worked in his shop--I done my ten hours a day right straight!”
“And this fellow Jerry Coleman? Hasn't he given you money?”
“But that was for propaganda--he was agent for Labour's National Peace Council--”
And the Comrade Doctor fairly snorted. “How could you be such an ass? Don't you read the news? But no--of course, you don't--you only read German dope!” And the Comrade Doctor drew out his pocket-book, which was bursting with clippings, and selected one from a New York paper, telling how the government was proceeding against the officials of an organization called “Labour's National Peace Council” for conspiring to cause strikes and violence. The founder of the organization was a person known as “the Wolf of Wall Street”; the funds had been furnished by a Prussian army officer, an attache of the German legation, who had used his official immunity to incite conspiracy and wholesale destruction of property in a friendly country. What had Jimmie to say to that?
And poor Jimmie for once had nothing to say. He sat, completely crushed. Not merely the money which he had got from Kumme on Saturday night, but also the ten-dollar bills which Jerry Coleman had been slipping into his hand--they, too, had come from the Kaiser! Was the whole radical movement to be taken over by the Kaiser, and Jimmie Higgins put out of his job?