The same crowd that Lanny had observed at the réunion; the same sort of persons, and in many cases no doubt the same individuals: men and women, hungry, undernourished from childhood, with pale faces set in grimmest hatred. Lanny knew more about them now; he knew that they meant blood, and so did their opponents. The submerged masses were in revolt against their masters and sworn to overturn them. A few weeks ago Lanny would have thought it was a blind revolt, but now he knew that it had eyes and directing brains.
He noticed how few of the marchers looked about them, or paid any attention to the watching crowds. They stared before them with a fixed gaze. Lanny remarked this to his companion, who replied: “They are looking into the future.”
“Do you really want it, Mr. Steffens?” Lanny asked him.
“Only half of me wants it,” replied the muckraker. “The other half is scared.” He meant to say more, but his words were drowned by the menacing thunder of the “Internationale”:
Arise, ye pris'ners of starvation,
Arise, ye wretched of the earth;
For justice thunders condemnation, A better world's in birth.
Woe to the Conquered
I
THERE was another question which the Big Four had to settle, and which they kept putting off because it contained so much dynamite. The problem of money, astronomical sums of money, the biggest that had ever been talked about in the history of mankind. Who was going to pay for the rebuilding of northeastern France? If this peasant people had to do it out of its own savings, it would be crippled for a generation. The Germans had wrought the ruin — a great deal of it quite wanton, such as the cutting of vines and fruit trees. The French had set the cost of reparations at two hundred billion dollars, and thought they were generous when they reduced it to forty. The Americans were insisting that twelve billions was the maximum that could be paid.