een
telling them poor _Nebiches_ what a rotten time the working-men had
_before_ the social revolution, y'understand, and what a good time the
working-man is going to have _after_ the social revolution, understand
me, but what kind of a time the working-man would have _during_ the
social revolution, THAT the Socialists left for them poor Russians to
find out for themselves, and when those working-men who come through it
alive begin to figure the profit and loss on the transaction, Abe, the
whole past life of one of those Socialist leaders is going to flash
before his eyes just before the drop falls, y'understand, and one of
his pleasantest recollections--if you can call recollections pleasant on
such an occasion--will be the happy days he spent knocking down fares on
the Third and Amsterdam Avenue cars."

"Then I take it you 'ain't got a whole lot of sympathy for the
Socialists, Mawruss," Abe said.

"Not since when I was a greenhorn I used to work at buttonhole-making,
and I heard a Socialist feller on East Houston Street hollering that
under a socialistic system the laborer would get the whole fruits of his
labor," Morris said. "Pretty near all that night I lay awake figuring to
myself that if I could make twelve buttonholes every ten minutes, which
would be seventy-two buttonholes an hour or seven hundred and twenty
buttonholes a day, Abe, how many buttonholes would I have in a year
under a socialistic system, and after I had them, what would I do with
them? The consequence was, I overslept myself and came down late to the
shop next morning, and it was more than two days before I found another
job."

"Well, that ain't much of an argument against socialism," Abe remarked.

"Not to most people it wouldn't be, but it was an awful good argument to
me, and I really think it saved me from becoming a Socialist," Morris
said.

"You a Socialist!" Abe exclaimed. "How could a feller like you become a
Socialist? I belong to the same lodge with you now for ten years, and in
all that time you've never had nerve enough to get up and say even so
much as '_I second the motion_.'"

"But there are two classes of Socialists, Abe--talkers and the
listeners, and while I admit the talkers are in the big majority, the
work of the listeners is just so important. They are the fellers which
try out the ideas of the talkers, the only difference being that while
such talkers as Herr Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg gets a lot of
publicity o