"It would help a whole lot, Mawruss," Abe said, "if Senators and Congressmen was numbered the same like automobiles, y'understand, because who is going to waste his breath arguing that the Senate should pass a law which it's a pipe the Senate ain't going to pass, on account that nobody is in favor of it except himself and a couple of other Senators temporarily absent on the road, making Fargo, Minneapolis, Chicago, and points east as traveling peace conventioners, y'understand, when he knows that next morning the only notice the New York newspapers will take of his Geschrei will be, Among those who spoke in the Senate yesterday was:
"Well, there's plenty of people which thinks when Governor Lauben wouldn't let them peace fellers run off their convention, y'understand, that it was unconstitutional," Morris said.
"Sure, I know," Abe said. "They're the same people which thinks that anything what helps us and hinders Germany is unconstitutional, including the Constitution. You take them socialist orators, which the only use they've got for soap is the boxes the soap comes in, y'understand, and to hear them talk you would think that the Kaiser sunk the Lusitania pursuant to Article Sixty-one, Section Two, of the Constitution of the United States, Mawruss, whereas when President Wilson sends a message to Congress asking them when they are going to get busy on the war taxes and what do they think this is, anyway—a Kaffeklatsch, y'understand—it is all kinds of violations of Articles Sixteen, Thirty-two, O.K. and C.O.D. of the Constitution and that the American people is a lot of weak-livered curs to stand for it, outside of being weak-livered curs, anyway."
"You mean to say we allow these here fellers to get up on soap-boxes and say such things like that?" Morris exclaimed.
"We've got to allow them," Abe replied. "The Constitution protects them."
"What do you mean—the Constitution protects them?" Morris said. "Here a couple of weeks ago a judge in North Carolina gives out a decision that the Constitution don't protect little children eleven years old from being made to work in factories, y'understand, and now you are trying to tell me that the same Constitution does protect these here loafers! What kind of a Constitution have we got, anyway?"
"I don't know, Mawruss, but there's this much about it, anyhow—a lawyer could get more money out of just one board of directors which wants to go ahead and put through the deal if under the Constitution of the United States nobody could do 'em nothing, y'understand, than he could out of all the children which gets injured working in all the cotton-mills south of Mason and Hamlin's line, understand me. So you see, Mawruss, the Constitution not only protects these here soap-box orators, but it also gives 'em something to talk about because when they want to knock the United States and boost Germany, all they need to say is that you've got to hand it to the Germans; if they kill little children, they're, anyhow, foreign children and not German children."
"I suppose a lot of them soap-box orators gets paid by the German government for boosting the Germans the way you just done it, Abe," Morris commented, "which I see that this here Ridder of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung gives it out that any one what accuses him that he is getting paid by the German government for boosting the Kaiser in his paper would got to stand a suit for liable, because he is too patriotic an American sitson to print articles boosting the Kaiser except as a matter of friendship and free of charge—outside of what he can make by syndicating them to other German newspapers."
"But do them other German newspapers get paid by the German government for reprinting Mr. Ridder's articles?" Abe asked.