“We'll have to,” replied the officer. “But it's a bit awkward, because the fellow who is most active in the matter happens to be an American.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Well, my God, if you arrest an American Red in Paris, you can't keep it away from the newspapers; then all the agitators at home will be swarming like hornets.”
Professor Davisson, who specialized in the Balkan languages, and had just come back from a mission to the Bulgarian front, expressed the opinion that the unprintable scoundrel ought to be dealt with by military law at once. To this Alston interposed a question: “What's the use of having licked the Germans if you have to sacrifice American free speech in the procèss?”
“Do you think that free speech means the right to overthrow the government which protects your free speech?” demanded Davisson “Free speech doesn't overthrow governments,” answered the other. “It's the lack of free speech.”
“You mean you'd let Bolsheviks incite our troops to mutiny?”
“They wouldn't get anywhere, Davisson — not unless there was something wrong with what the army was doing.”
So they argued, and got rather hot about it, as men were apt to do these days; until one of them, wishing to dissipate the storm clouds, asked of Captain Stratton: “What sort of fellow is it that's printing the leaflets?”
“He calls himself a painter, but I don't know if he works at it. He's lived most of his life over here, and I guess he's absorbed what the Reds call their 'ideology.”
“Budd knows a lot of painters here,” said Lanny's employer. “What's the man's name?”