"It's the freedom breaking out on her," Morris said.
"It seems, however," said Abe, "that in Russia there are as many kinds of freedom as there are fellers that want a job running a revolution. There was the Kerensky brand of freedom which was quite popular for a while; then Korniloff tried to market another brand of freedom and made a failure of it, and now Trotzky and Lenine are putting out the T. and L. Brand of Self-rising Freedom in red packages, and seem to be doing quite a good business, too."
"Sure I know," Morris agreed. "But you would think that freedom was freedom and that there could be no arguments about it, so why the devil do them poor Russian working-men go on fighting each other, Abe?"
"They want an immediate peace with Germany," Abe said, "and the way it looks now, they would still be fighting each other for an immediate peace with Germany ten years after the war is over, because if them Russian working-men was to get an immediate peace immediately, Mawruss, they would have to go to work again, and you know as well as I do, Mawruss, the very last thing that a Russian working-man thinks of, y'understand, is working."
"Well in a way, you couldn't blame the Russians for what is going on in Russland, Abe," Morris said. "For years already the Socialists has been telling them poor Nebiches what a rotten time the working-men had before the social revolution, y'understand, and what a good time the working-man is going to have after the social revolution, understand me, but what kind of a time the working-man would have during the social revolution, THAT the Socialists left for them poor Russians to find out for themselves, and when those working-men who come through it alive begin to figure the profit and loss on the transaction, Abe, the whole past life of one of those Socialist leaders is going to flash before his eyes just before the drop falls, y'understand, and one of his pleasantest recollections—if you can call recollections pleasant on such an occasion—will be the happy days he spent knocking down fares on the Third and Amsterdam Avenue cars."
"Then I take it you 'ain't got a whole lot of sympathy for the Socialists, Mawruss," Abe said.
"Not since when I was a greenhorn I used to work at buttonhole-making, and I heard a Socialist feller on East Houston Street hollering that under a socialistic system the laborer would get the whole fruits of his labor," Morris said. "Pretty near all that night I lay awake figuring to myself that if I could make twelve buttonholes every ten minutes, which would be seventy-two buttonholes an hour or seven hundred and twenty buttonholes a day, Abe, how many buttonholes would I have in a year under a socialistic system, and after I had them, what would I do with them? The consequence was, I overslept myself and came down late to the shop next morning, and it was more than two days before I found another job."
"Well, that ain't much of an argument against socialism," Abe remarked.
"Not to most people it wouldn't be, but it was an awful good argument to me, and I really think it saved me from becoming a Socialist," Morris said.
"You a Socialist!" Abe exclaimed. "How could a feller like you become a Socialist? I belong to the same lodge with you now for ten years, and in all that time you've never had nerve enough to get up and say even so much as 'I second the motion.'"