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e it's their own fault, Abe. They go to work and announce a general strike, and naturally the authorities takes them seriously and gets ready for trouble with a lot of policemen, which you know as well as I do, Abe, when the police gets ready for trouble they usually find it, even if they have to make it themselves. The consequence is, Abe, that a fractured skull has become practically the occupational disease of being a socialist, just the same as phosphorus-poisoning attacked people which worked in match-factories in the old days before the Swedish manufacturers invented matches which strike only on the box one time out of fifty if the weather conditions is just right." "Sure, I know," Abe observed, "but people worked in match-factories because they couldn't make a living in any other way, Mawruss, whereas nobody compels any one to be a socialist if he don't want to, Mawruss, and what enjoyment them socialists get out of it I don't know." "It gives them, for one thing, the privilege of wearing a red necktie," Morris suggested. "And that don't make them a first-class risk for accident insurance," Abe concluded, "around the first of May, anyhow." XV THE PEACE TREATY AS GOOD READING "At last the wind-up of this here Peace Conference seems to be in sight, Mawruss," Abe Potash said to his partner, Morris Perlmutter, the day after the Treaty of Peace was handed to the German plenipotentiaries. "As short a time ago since as last week it begun to look like our American delegates was going to stay in Paris for the rest of their lives, which, according to the tables of mortality prepared by some of our leading life-insurance companies, based on the average ages of all five of them delegates, would be anyhow until August 1, 1919." "Well, they seem to have done a pretty good job, Abe," Morris observed. "I read over the accounts of the Treaty of Peace, Abe, and what them Germans has got to do outside of restoring the skull of the Sultan Okwawa under Section Eight of the treaty would keep her busy for fifty years yet." "And who is this here Sultan Okwawa?" Abe inquired. "I don't know," Morris replied, "but, considering the number of skulls which needs restoring on account of what the Germans done during the past five years, Abe, and also considering the fact that this is the only skull mentioned by name in the Peace Treaty, he must of had some pretty influential friends at the Peace Conference. Also, I s
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