It was becoming more and more the fashion to arrest Socialists and to suppress their papers; the government authorities in many places declared the “majority report” unmailable, and indicted state and national secretaries for having sent it out in the ordinary routine of their business.  Jimmie received a letter from Comrade Meissner in Leesville, telling him that Comrade “Jack” Smith had been given two years in the penitentiary for his speech in the Opera-house, and the other would-be speakers had been fined five hundred dollars each.  Several issues of the Worker had been barred from the mails, and now the police had raided the offices and forced the suspension of the publication.  All over the country that sort of thing was happening, so now if you argued with Jimmie in favour of the war, his answer was that America was more Prussian than Prussia, and what was the use of fighting for Democracy abroad, if you had to sacrifice every particle of Democracy at home in order to win the fight?

Jimmie really believed this—­he believed it with most desperate and passionate intensity.  He looked forward to a war won for the benefit of oppression at home; he foresaw the system of militarism and suppession riveted for ever on the people of America.  Jimmie would admit that the President himself might be sincere in the fine words he used about democracy; but the great Wall Street interests which had run the country for so many decades—­they had their secret purposes, for which the war-frenzy served as a convenient cloak.  They were going to make universal military service the rule in America; they were going to see to it that every school-child learned the military lessons of obedience and subordination.  Also they were going to put the radical papers out of business and put a stop to all radical propaganda.  Those Socialists who had been trapped into supporting the President’s war-programme would wake up some morning with a fearful dark-brown taste in their mouths!

No, said Jimmie Higgins, the way to fight war was to resist the subterfuges, however cunning and plausible, by which men sought to persuade you to support war.  The way to fight war was the way of the Russians.  The propaganda of proletarian revolt, the glorious example which the Russian workers had set, would do more to break down the power of the Kaiser than all the guns and shells in the world.  But the militarists did not want it broken that way—­Jimmie suspected that many of them would rather have the war won by the Kaiser than have it won by the Socialists.  The governments refused to give passports to Socialists who wanted to meet in some neutral country and work out the basis of a settlement upon which all the peoples of the world might get together; and Jimmie took the banning of this Socialist conference as the supreme crime of the world-capitalism, it was evidence that world-capitalism knew its true enemy, and meant to use the war as an excuse to hold that enemy down.