So Jimmie shut up for a while; and when he went out with his armful of purchases, an aged, white-whiskered patriarch who had been listening got up and followed him out.  “I’m going your way,” he said.  “Git in with me.”  Jimmie climbed into the buggy; and while the bony old mare ambled along through the summer night the driver asked questions about Jimmie’s life.  Where had he been brought up?  How had it been possible for a man to live all his life in America, and know so little about his native land?

Peter Drew was this old farmer’s name, and he had been in the first battle of Bull Run, and had fought with the Army of Northern Virginia all the way to Richmond.  So he knew how American armies behave; he could tell Jimmie about a million free men who had rushed to arms to save their nation’s integrity, and had made a clean job of it, and then gone quietly back to their work at farm and forge.  Jimmie had heard Comrade Mary Allen, the Quaker, make the statement that “Force never settled anything”.  He repeated this now, and the other replied that an American ought to be the last person in the world to make such a statement, for his country had provided the best illustration in history of the importance of a good job of spanking.  It was force that had settled the slavery question—­and settled it so that now you might travel in the South and have a hard time to find a man that would want to unsettle it.

But Jimmie knew nothing about all that; he knew nothing about anything in America.  The old man said it frightened him to realize that the country had let a man grow up in it with so little understanding of its soul.  All that precious tradition, utterly dead so far as Jimmie was concerned!  All those heroes who had died to make free the land in which he lived, and to keep it free—­and he did not know their names, he did not even know the names of the great battles they had fought!  The old man’s voice trembled and he laid his hand on Jimmie’s knee.

The little Socialist tried to explain that he had dreams of his own.  He was fighting for international freedom—­his patriotism was higher and wider than any one country.  And that was all right, said the other, but why kick down the ladder by which you had climbed—­and especially when you had perhaps not entirely finished climbing?  Why not know the better side of your own country, and appeal to it?  Peter Drew went on to tell of a speech he had heard Abraham Lincoln make, and to quote things Lincoln had said; could Jimmie doubt that Lincoln would have opposed the rule of the country by Wall Street?  And when a country had been shaped and guided by such men as Lincoln, why trample its face and besmirch its good name—­just because there were in it some evil men contending against its ideals of freedom and democracy?