“You bet your life!”
“No!” said the painter with a smile. “You'll hire other men, as you always do. And if they turn the guns against you, what then?”
“I'll be on the watch for them! One of them was fool enough to forewarn me!”
“History has forewarned you, Robbie Budd, but you won't learn. The French Revolution told you that the days of divine right were over; but you've built a new system exactly like the old one in its practical results — blind squandering at the top, starvation and despair at the bottom, an insanity of greed ending in mass slaughter. Now you see the Russian revolt, but you scorn to learn from it!”
“We've learned to shut the sons-of-bitches up in their rat-holes, and let them freeze and starve, or die of typhus and eat their own corpses.”
“Please, Robbie!” interposed the son. “You're getting yourself all worked up — ”
Said the painter: “Typhus has a way of spreading beyond national boundaries; and so have ideas.”
“We can quarantine disease; and I promise you, we're going to put the right man in the White House, and step on your Red ideas and smash the guts out of them.”
“Listen, Robbie, do be sensible! You're wasting an awful lot of energy.”
“Stay in France, Jesse Blackless, and spit your poison all over the landscape; but don't try it in America — not in Newcastle, I warn you!”