wall and as far as you could see. They
weren't saying a word or singing a song, and there wasn't even a drum to
keep time. But they moved along with their wives and kids as though
they'd left home, job and church, and were looking for something else so
hard they didn't care for bullets. I saw 'em shot down like so many
sheep. But bullets won't stop what I saw in their eyes. God knows I
don't want a religion. I'm no socialist nor anarchist. But if there's
one thing I want to hang on to it's my belief in the common crowd.
They've had a raw deal since the world began. They can have the whole
earth whenever they want it. And they're beginning to want it hard!

"Forget your own name and jump into the crowd, write and don't stop to
remember you're writing! The place _you_ need is the U. S. A.--and the
work you need is a job on a paper!"

"Are you through?" I snapped.

"I am!"

"All right," said I. "I'm going to stay just where I am! I'm not going
to be yanked by you all over the earth, to write news articles on the
run! I'm going to stick in one place--right here--and take my time and
learn my job. I don't want to write news, I want to write books. I'd
rather write one good novel than all the headline stuff in the world.
It's books that make the headlines."

"_Books?_" Joe's look was funny.

"Sure they do. Take Russia. What started this whole revolution! Books.
It didn't start with your common crowds--they were all eating fried
onions. It started with a few writers of novels!"

"Who left their little mahogany desks," said Joe, "got into peasant
clothes and went to live with the peasants!"

"Oh no they didn't. Only a few. Turgenief didn't. Tchernichefsky didn't.
Dostoiefsky----"

"Say. Are they Russians? I never heard their names up there."

I looked at J. K. thoughtfully.

"No," I said. "You wouldn't. As yet they're not quite crowdy enough. But
they are Russians and their ideas made most of the first revolutionists.
The whole revolution was started by books."

"It wasn't," snapped Joe. "It was taxes. Their taxes were doubled
because of the war, and----"

"Oh, damn your war taxes, and damn your plows and your corn and hay!
You've got a hay mind, that's the trouble with you! You've got so you
think that hay and bread and pork and beans are all men live and die
for! They don't, Mister Reporter, they die for ideals--freedom,
democracy, human rights--which are in 'em so deep that when a big writer
sees 'em there