The plans for the Worker were delayed, for the reason that when Comrade Mary Allen, the Quaker, went to look for Jerry Coleman the day after the fire, that dispenser of ten dollar bills had mysteriously disappeared.  It was a week before he showed up again; and meantime fresh events had taken place, both in the local and outside.  To begin with the latter, as presumably the more important, an English passenger liner, the pride of the Atlantic fleet, loaded to the last cabin with American millionaires, was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine.  More than a thousand men, women and children went down, and the deed sent a shudder of horror through the civilized world.  At the meeting of Local Leesville, which happened to take place the evening afterward, it proved a difficult matter to get business started.

The members stood about and argued.  What could you say about a government that ordered a crime like that?  What could you say about a naval officer who would carry out such an order?  Thus Comrade Norwood, the young lawyer; and Schneider, the brewer, answered that the German government had done everything that any reasonable man could ask.  It had published a notice in the New York papers, to the effect that the vessel was subject to attack, and that anyone who travelled on her would do so at his peril.  If women and children would ride on munition-ships—­

“Munition-ships?” cried Norwood; and then Schneider pointed to a news-dispatch, to the effect that the Lusitania had had on board a shipment of cartridge-cases.

“A fine lot of munitions!” jeered the lawyer.

Well, was the reply, what were cartridge-cases for, if not to kill Germans?  The Germans had been attacked by the whole world, and they had to defend themselves.  When you looked at Comrade Schneider, you saw a man who felt himself attacked by the whole world; his face was red up to the roots of his hair, and he was ready to defend himself with any weapon he could get hold of.

Comrade Koeln, a big glass-blower, broke into the discussion.  The German government was authority for the statement that the Lusitania had been armed with guns.  And when Norwood hooted at this, every German in the room was up in arms.  What did he have to disprove it?  The word of the British government!  Was not “perfidious Albion” a byword!

“The thing that beats me,” declared the young lawyer, “is the way you Germans stand up for the Kaiser now, when before the war you couldn’t find enough bad things to say about him.”

“What beats me,” countered Schneider, “is how you Americans stand up for King George.  Every newspaper in Wall Street howling for America to go into the war—­just because some millionaires got killed!”

“You don’t seem to realize that the greater number of the men who lost their lives on that ship were working men!”

“Ho!  Ho!” hooted Comrade Stankewitz.  “Vall Street loves so the vorking men!”