eality it's the protelariat which
is squashing the feller with the two-thousand-dollar-a-year apartment
and expensive automobile? _Oser a Stueck!_"

"Well, it only goes to show that a feller can even make money by being a
Socialist if he only sticks to it long enough," Morris said.

"At that, he's probably got more sympathy mit the protelariat than he
ever did, Mawruss, because before he owned an automobile he only
_suspected_ what them fellers was missing by being poor. Now he
_knows_."

"And I suppose by the time he is running for President on the
Socialistic ticket," Morris said, "he'll be owning a steam-yacht and the
wrongs of the working classes will be pretty near breaking his heart."

"Even so, Mawruss, he won't be changing his mind, and I don't know but
what he'll be acting wise, too," Abe said, "because when a politician
gets a reputation for carrying a certain line of stable opinions his
customers naturally expects that he is going to continue to carry 'em,
and when he drops that line and lays in a stock of new stuff in the way
of political ideas, y'understand, his customers leave him and he's got
to build up his trade over again; and that's no way for a feller to get
into the steam-yacht class--I don't care if he would be a politician or
a garment-manufacturer."

"Well, of course, if a feller's opinions is his living, you couldn't
blame him for not changing 'em," Morris said, "_aber_ this here Root is
already retired from business, and the chances is that, the way he's got
his money invested, it wouldn't make no difference _how_ liberal-minded
he was, the corporations would have to pay the coupons, anyway."

"I know they would," Abe agreed, "but you take some of these Senators
and Congressmen which they started out before we was at war with Germany
to show an attractive line of pro-German ideas--that is to say,
attractive to their regular customers out in Wisconsin and Saint Louis,
understand me, and people don't figure that them poor fellers has got
mortgages falling due on 'em next year and boys to put through college.
For all people knows, Mawruss, this here McLemon which used to make a
speciality of speeches warning Americans off of ocean steamships was
supporting half his wife's family and widowed sister that way. The chances
is that he sees now what a rotten line of argument that was, and he would
like to switch over and display some snappy nineteen-seventeen-model
speeches about the freedom of th