I.  
Winter was coming, and the farm-workers moved to the cities; but this year they did not go as down-and-out-o'-works—they went, each man a little kink. Jimmie wandered into the city of Ironton, and got himself a job in a big automobile shop at eight dollars a day, and set to work agitating for ten dollars. It was not that he had any need of the extra two dollars, of course, but merely because his first principle in life was to make trouble for the profit-system. The capitalist papers of this middle-Western metropolis were furiously denouncing working-men who struck “against their country” in war-time; Jimmie, on the other hand, denounced those who used “country” as camouflage for “boss” and made the war a pretext to deprive labour of its most precious right.
There was a Socialist local in Ironton, still active and determined in spite of the fact that its office had been raided by the police, and most of the party's papers and magazines barred from the mails. You could always get leaflets printed, however; and if you could no longer denounce the war directly, you could jeer at England's exhibition of “democracy” in Ireland, you could point to the profits of the profiteers, and demand conscription of wealth along with conscription of manhood. Some American Socialists became almost as subtle as that German rebel of pre-war days, who, desiring to lampoon the Kaiser, wrote an account of the life of the Roman Emperor Agricola, reciting his vanities and insane extravagances.
Late in the autumn came an event which should have troubed Jimmie Higgins more deeply than it did. Along the Izonzo river the Italian armies were facing the Austrians, their hereditary enemies; they were at the end of a long, exhaustive, and for the most part unsuccessful campaign, and the Italian Socialists at home were carrying on precisely such a warfare against their own government as Jimmie Higgins was carrying on in America. They were helped by the Catholic intriguers, who hated the Italian government because it had destroyed the temporal power of the Pope; they were helped by the subtle and persistent efforts of Austrian agents in their country, who spread rumours among Italian troops of the friendly intentions of the Austrians, and of the imminence of a truce. These agents went so far as to fake copies of the leading Italian newspapers, with accounts of starvation and riots in the home cities, and the shooting down of women and children. These papers were given out in the Italian trenches, before a certain mountain-sector where the Austrian troops had been fraternizing with the Italians; and then, during the night, the Austrian troops were withdrawn, and picked German “shock-troops” substituted, which attacked at dawn and drove through the Italian lines, sweeping back the army along a hundred-mile front, capturing some quarter of a million prisoners and a couple of thousand cannon—practically all the Italians had.
That Jimmie Higgins did not pay more attention to this terrifying incident was in part because he read it in the capitalist papers and did not believe it; but mainly because his whole attention just now was centred on Russia, where the proletariat was about to make its bid for power. Now you would see how wars were to be ended and peace restored to a distracted world!
The moderate Socialist government of Kerensky was pleading with the capitalist masters of the Allied nations for a statement of their peace terms, so that the workers of Russia might know what they were fighting for. The Russian workers wanted a declaration in favour of no annexations, no indemnities, and disarmament; on such terms they would help fight the war, in spite of all the starvation and suffering in distracted Russia. But the Allied statesmen would not make any such declaration, and the Russian workers, backed by all the Socialists of the world, declared that the reason was that these Allied statesmen were waging an imperialist war—they did not intend to stop fighting until they had taken vast territories from the German powers, and exacted a ransom that would cripple Germany for a generation. The Russian workers refused point-blank to fight for such aims, and so in November came the second revolution, the uprising of the Bolsheviki.
Almost their first action when they took possession of the palaces and government archives was to publish to the world the secret treaties which the rulers of England, France and Italy had made with Russia. These treaties formed a complete justification for the attitude of the Russian revolutionists—they showed that the Allied imperialists had planned most shameless plundering; England was to have the German colonies and Mesopotamia, France was to have German territory to the Rhine, and Italy was to have the Adriatic coast, and to divide Palestine and Syria with England and France.
And here was the most significant fact to Jimmie Higgins—these enormously important revelations, the most important since the beginning of the war, were practically suppressed by the capitalist newspapers of America! First these papers printed a brief item—the Bolsheviki had given out what they claimed were secret treaties, but the genuineness of these documents was gravely doubted. Then they published evasive and lying denials from the British, French and Italian diplomats; and then they shut up! Not another word did you read about those secret treaties; except for one or two American newspapers with traditions of honour, the full text of those treaties was given in the Socialist press alone! “And now,” cried Jimmie Higgins to the working men in his shop, “what do you think of those wonderful allies of ours? What do you think of those Wall Street newspapers of ours?” Could any working-man who had such facts put before him fail to realize that Jimmie Higgins had a case, and a most important work in the world to do, in spite of all his unreason and his narrowness?
II.
 
Jimmie was now in the seventh heaven, walking as if on air. A proletarian government at last, the first in history! A government of working-men like himself, running their own affairs, without the help of politicians or bankers! Coming out before the world and telling the truth about matters of state, in language that common men could understand! Disbanding the armies, and sending the workers home! Turning the masters out of the factories, and putting shop-committees in control! Taking away the advertising from the crooked capitalist papers, and so putting them out of business! Our little friend would rush to the corner every morning to get the paper and see what had happened next; he would go down the street so excited that he forgot his breakfast.
Jimmie had made a new acquaintance in Ironton; the little tailor, Rabin, whose name was Scholem, which means Peace, had given him a letter to his brother, whose name was Deror, which means Freedom. Each afternoon when the automobile factory let out, Jimmie would get an evening paper and take it to Deror's tailor-shop and the two would spell out the news. By God, look at this! Did you ever hear the like? The man in charge of the Bolshevik foreign office was a Marxian Jew who had helped edit the Novy Mir, the revolutionary paper which Scholem had read to Jimmie! He had been a waiter in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, and now he was giving out the secret treaties, and issuing propaganda manifestoes to the international proletariat.
The American capitalist press was full of lies about the new revolution, of course; but Jimmie could read pretty well between the lines of the capitalist press, and the few Socialist papers that were still in business, and which he read at the headquarters of the local, gave him the rest of what he wanted. To Jimmie, of course, everything the Bolsheviki did was right; if it wasn't right it was a lie. The little machinist knew that the Bolsheviki had repudiated the four-billion-dollar debt which the government of the Tsar had contracted with the bankers of France, and Jimmie knew perfectly well what was the lying power of four billion dollars.
The American papers were shocked because the Russian Socialists were deserting the cause of democracy, and giving Germany a chance to win the war. The American papers called them German agents, but Jimmie did not take any stock in such talk as this. Jimmie was familiar with the “frame-up” as it is operated against the workers in America. He saw that the first thing the Bolshevik leaders did was to make an appeal to the revolutionary workers of Germany. The Russian proletariat had shown the way—now let the German proletariat follow! Literature was printed and shipped wholesale into Germany, leaflets were dropped by aviators among the German troops; and when Jimmie and Deror read that the German generals had protested to the Russians against such practices, they laughed aloud with delight. Well might the war-lords squeal; they knew what was ............