ses; their money kept the railroads going so they could carry
politicians and some of us working men free.

CHAPTER XXII. LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE

After I had read the various pamphlets that Bannerman gave me I was like
the old negro who went to sleep with his mouth open. A white man came
along and put a spoonful of quinine in his mouth. When the negro woke up
the bitter taste worried him. "What does it mean?" he asked. The white
man told him it meant that he "had done bu'sted his gall bladder and
didn't have long to live." A mighty bad taste was left in my mouth by
those communist pamphlets. If they were telling the truth I realized
that labor's gall bladder had done bu'sted and we didn't have long to
live. One book said that British capitalists owned all the money in
the world and that at a given signal they would draw the money out of
America and the working men here would starve to death in twenty-nine
days. It seemed that some crank had fasted that many days in order to
get accurate statistics showing just how long the working man could hope
to last after England pushed the button for the money panic.

Another book said that Wall Street now owned ninety per cent. of the
wealth in America and was getting the other ten at the rate of eight per
cent. a year. Within twelve years Wall Street would own everything in
the world, and mankind would be left naked and starving.

The wildest book of all was called Caesar's Column. It was in the form
of a novel and told how the rich in America worshiped gold and lust
instead of God and brotherly love, and how they drove their carriages
over the working man's children and left them crushed and bleeding in
the street. America had ceased to be a republic and was an oligarchy
of wealth all owned by a dozen great families while the millions were
starving. The end of the book described a great revolution in which the
people arose, led by an Italian communist named Caesar Spadoni. The mob
took all the fine houses and killed the rich people. Caesar took the
bodies and, laying them in cement like bricks, he built an enormous
column of corpses in Union Square towering higher than any building in
New York. He established his headquarters in a Fifth Avenue palace and
was directing the slaughter of all men who owned property, when some of
his followers got jealous of his fine position and killed him and burned
the house. By that time everything in America was destroyed, and the