what business he had with the Old Man?"
how much he got?"
Having mailed the letter to Lipsky and sent off the copy to the printer, we turned in just at sun-up.
We were awakened a few hours later by the arrival of a socialist committee. There was Dowd, a Scotch carpenter; Kaufmann, a brewery driver, and Lipsky, the candidate. He was a Russian Jew, and had been a professor in the old country. He could speak very little English, but he had served a long term of exile in the Siberian prison mines.
The socialists had no idea of winning the election. The campaign was for them only a demonstration, a couple of months when they had larger audiences at their soap-box meetings. They were suspicious of us.
That consultation is one of the most ludicrous of my memories. Benson, sitting in an arm-chair, in blue silk pajamas, smoking cigarettes, outlined the plan in his fervent, profane, pyrotechnic way—much of which was beyond their comprehension. Kaufmann had to translate it into German for Lipsky. And when we talked German, Dowd could not understand.
"But," said Herr Lipsky, when the posters had been translated to him, "there is nothing there about our principles. There is no word about surplus value. It is not the red lantern we are fighting—but the Kapitalismus."
"The people," Benson raged—"the people with votes don't know surplus value from the binominal theorem. Perhaps they will vote for their daughters—they can see them. But they won't get excited about their great-great-grandchildren."
There was a squabble among the committee-men. The Scotchman was too canny to take sides; he wanted to refer the matter to the local, which was not to meet until two days before the election.
"Aber," said the brewery man, "Ve need etwas gongrete."