enough money to buy his little shack he would have hated me as he
hated the lodge members in the Pullmans. I did not hate those
men. They were doing me a service by traveling across the
country. For they belonged to the fare-paying classes; their
money kept the railroads going so they could carry politicians
and some of us working men free.



CHAPTER XXII

LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE


After I had read the various pamphlets that Bannerman gave me I
was like the old negro who went to sleep with his mouth open. A
white man came along and put a spoonful of quinine in his mouth.
When the negro woke up the bitter taste worried him. "What does
it mean?" he asked. The white man told him it meant that he "had
done bu'sted his gall bladder and didn't have long to live." A
mighty bad taste was left in my mouth by those communist
pamphlets. If they were telling the truth I realized that labor's
gall bladder had done bu'sted and we didn't have long to live.
One book said that British capitalists owned all the money in the
world and that at a given signal they would draw the money out of
America and the working men here would starve to death in
twenty-nine days. It seemed that some crank had fasted that many
days in order to get accurate statistics showing just how long
the working man could hope to last after England pushed the
button for the money panic.