"That's only another way of them impressions about Germany which us Americans has had reversed on us, Abe," Morris said, "which the way our idees about what kind of a people the Germans used to was has changed, Mawruss, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the old habit the Germans had for drinking beer was just a bluff, y'understand, and that at heart they was prohibitionists to a man. In fact, Abe, if I would be a German Bolshevik with instructions to shoot the Kaiser on sight, I should go gunning for a short, stout man with a tooth-brush mustache and a holy horror of wearing uniforms, because it's my opinion that all them so-called portraits of the Kaiser was issued for the purpose of misleading anarchists to shoot at a thin man in a heavily embroidered uniform with spike-end mustaches."
"Well, whatever he looks like, Mawruss," Abe said, "if I was him, rather than have such a terrible fate hanging over me, y'understand, I would telegraph to Berlin for them to send along a good shot while they was about it, and have the thing over with quick, Mawruss."
"Say!" Morris exclaimed. "You and me should have hanging over us the life which the Kaiser is going to lead from now on! For two hundred and fifty dollars a week at a Pallum Beach hotel you could only get a very small idea of the hardships the Kaiser will got to undergo in the future, Abe."
"But do you mean to told me that after what happened to that English lady in Brussels and the captain of the English mail-boat, Mawruss, the English ain't going to persecute the Kaiser?" Abe demanded.
"You—the English would persecute the Kaiser!" Morris exclaimed. "Don't you know that the Kaiser's mother was the King of England's father's sister? Do you suppose for a moment that the King of England wants a convict in the family?"
"Well, has he got any mishbocha in France, Mawruss?" Abe asked. "Because if not, Mawruss, it seems to me that now, while all the witnesses is in Paris, it wouldn't be a bad idea to get the March term of the Paris County grand jury to hand down an indictment for murder with intent to kill or something."
"That sounds reasonable to anybody not connected with this here Peace Conference, Abe," Morris admitted, "but it seems that the Committee for Fixing Responsibility says that if they was to hang or shoot the Kaiser it would give him an awful drag with the German people, and they don't want the Kaiser to get popular again, dead or alive. Their idea is to punish him by letting him live on to be an outcast among all the people of the earth, except the proprietors of first-class European hotels, dealers in high-grade automobiles, expensive jewelry storekeepers, fashionable tailors, and a couple of million other people who don't attach an awful lot of importance to the moral character of anybody which wants to enjoy life and has got the money to do it with. In other words, Abe, they claim that, in leaving the Kaiser to his conscience and his bank-account they are punishing him a whole lot worse as hanging him or shooting him."
"And I suppose that same committee is going to sentence von Tirpitz to six months at Monte Carlo, while Ludendorff will probably be confined to a Ritz hotel eight hours a day for the rest of his natural life," Abe suggested.
"The committee claims not," Morris replied. "It seems that the Kaiser's ministers—like von Tirpitz and Ludendorff—is going to get what is coming to them, on the grounds that they are guilty of violations of international law and 'ain't got no relations among the royal families of England or Italy."
"But why not bring the whole fleet over to America, and let the authorities dispose of them there?" Abe inquired.