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