As for Jimmie Higgins, his problem was not so complicated.  He had no relatives anywhere that he knew of; and if he had any “country”, the country had failed to make him aware of the fact.  The first thing the “country” had done for him was to put him into the hands of a negro woman who fed him gruel and water and gave him no blanket in winter.  To Jimmie this country was an aggregation of owners and bosses, who made you sweat hard for your wages, and sent the police to club you if you made any kick.  A soldier Jimmie thought of as a fellow who came to help the police when they got hard pushed.  This soldier walked with his chest out and his nose in the air, and Jimmie referred to him as a “tin willie”, and summed him up as a traitor to the working-class.

And so it was easy for our little machinist to agree with the Roumanian Jewish cigar-seller in calling himself an “anti-nationalist”.  It was easy for him to laugh and applaud when “Wild Bill” demanded what the hell difference it made to any working man whether or not the Kaiser got a railroad to Bagdad.  He did not thrill in the least over the story of the British Army falling back step by step across France, and holding ten times their number of invaders.  The papers called this “heroism”; but to Jimmie it was a lot of poor fools who had had a flag waved in their eyes, and had sold themselves for a shilling to the landlords of their country.  In one of the Socialist papers that Jimmie read, there appeared every week a series of comic pictures in which the working man was figured as a guileless fool by the name of “Henry Dubb”.  Poor Henry always believed what he was told, and at the end of each adventure he got a thump on the top of his nut which caused stars to sprout over the page.  And of the many adventures of Henry Dubb, the most absurd were when he got himself into a uniform.  Jimmie would cut these pictures out and pass them round in the shop, and among his neighbours in the row of tenement-shacks where he lived.

Nor did it make much difference in Jimmie’s feelings when he read of German atrocities.  To begin with, he did not believe in them; they were just a part of the poison-gas of war.  When men were willing to stab one another with bayonets, and to blow one another to pieces with bombs, they would be willing to lie about one another, you might be sure; the governments would lie deliberately, as one of the ways of making the soldiers fight harder.  What? argued Jimmie:  tell him that Germans were a lot of savages?  When he lived in a city with hundreds of them, and met them all the time at the local?