les
to consider the matter from, Abe, the country would have been tied up
into such knots over the coal-and-freight situation that it would have
required not five days, but five hundred days, to untangle it,
y'understand," Morris said.

"But it seems to me, Mawruss, that Mr. Garfield could have spent, say,
twenty-five minutes longer on that order of his, so that a manufacturer
could tell from reading it over a few dozen times, with the assistance
of a first-class, cracker-jack, A-number-one criminal lawyer, just what
it was he couldn't do without making himself liable to a fine of five
thousand dollars and one year imprisonment, y'understand," Abe said. "In
fact, Mawruss, if the average manufacturer is going to try to understand
that order before he does anything about it he'll have to shut down for
five days while he is working to puzzle it out, and then he will keep
his place closed down for five days longer while he is resting up from
brain fag, understand me. Take, for instance, a department store which
sells liquors and groceries, has a doctor in charge of the rest-room,
and runs a public lunch-room in the basement, y'understand, and if the
proprietor decided to make a test case of it by hiring John B.
Stanchfield and keeping open on Monday, Mawruss, once Mr. Garfield got
on the witness-stand and started to explain just what the exemptions
exempted, y'understand, it would be years and years before he ever had a
chance to see the old college again."

"But Mr. Garfield wrote that order to save coal, not arguments, Abe,"
Morris said. "He expected that the business men of the country would do
the sensible thing next Monday by staying home and playing pinochle or
poker, and those fellers which don't know enough about cards to even
_kibbitze_ the game, y'understand, could go into another room and start
in on their income-tax blanks, which, when it comes to figuring out what
is capital and what is income in the excess-profits returns, Abe, there
is many a business man which would not only put in all his Mondays
between now and the first of March trying to straighten it out,
y'understand, but would also be asking for further extensions of time to
finish it up along about the fifteenth of April."

"And that's the way it goes, Mawruss," Abe commented, with a sigh. "It
use to was in the old days that all a feller had to know to go into the
clothing business was clothing, y'understand, but nowadays a
manufacturer of clothin