"I know the Senators is saying that, and I also know that Mr. Wilson says it ain't so," Abe agreed, "but this here fuss about international affairs has got what the lawyers calls a statue of limitations running against it right now, and I give both Mr. Wilson and the Senate six months, and they will be going round saying: 'Do you remember when six months ago we got so terrible worked up over that—now—National League,' and somebody who is sitting near them will ask, for the sake of having things just right, 'You mean that League of Nations, ain't it?' and Mr. Wilson will say: 'League of Nations! National League! What's the difference? Let's have another round of Old Dr. Turner's Favorite Asparagus Tonic and forget about it.'"
"So you think that all this international politics will be forgotten as quickly as that?" Morris commented.
"Say!" Abe said, "it won't take long for Mr. Wilson to settle down into American ways again. Of course it will be pretty hard for him during the first few weeks, whenever he gets a sick headache, to send out for a doctor instead of an admiral, and he may miss his evening schmooes with Clemenceau, Lord George, and Orlando, but any one that will have such a lot of clav hasholom times to talk over as Mr. Wilson will for the rest of his life, even if he does have to hold out some of the stuff for his History of the Peace Conference in three volumes, price twenty-five dollars, Mawruss, would never need to play double solitaire in order to fill in the time between supper and seeing is the pantry window locked in case Mrs. Wilson is nervous that way. Then again there is things happening in this country which looked very picayune to Mr. Wilson over in France, and which will seem so big when he arrives here that almost as soon as he sets his foot on the dock in Hoboken, the League of Nations will get marked off in his mind for depreciation as much as a new automobile does by merely having the owner's number plates attached to it, even if it ain't been run two miles from the agency yet."
"I never thought of it that way," Morris admitted, "but it is a fact just the same that this here League of Nations is only being operated at the present time under a demonstrator's license, so to speak, and as soon as it gets its regular number, the manufacturers and the agents won't be so sensitive about the knocks that the prospective customers is handing it."
"And just so soon as the demonstrations have gone far enough, Mawruss, just you watch all the nations of the earth that ain't made up their minds whether they want to ride or not, jump aboard," Abe said. "Also, Mawruss, this League of Nations is to the United States Senate what a new-car proposition is to the head of any respectable family. If the wife wants it and the children wants it, it may be that the old man will think it over for a couple of weeks, and he may begin by saying that the family would get a new car over his dead body, and what do they think he is made of, money? y'understand, but sooner or later he is going to sign up for that new car, and don't you forget it. And after all, Mawruss, if the other big nations is in on this League of Nations, we could certainly afford to pay our share of what it costs to run it."
"Maybe we could," Morris concluded, "but if a new League of Nations is like a new automobile, we are probably in for an expensive time, because with a new car, Abe, it ain't what you run that costs so much money. It's what you back into."