It chanced that in San Francisco a well-known labour leader had been charged with planting a bomb to break up a “preparedness” parade. He had been convicted upon that which was proven to be perjured testimony, and the labour unions of the country had been conducting a campaign to save his life--which campaign the capitalist newspapers had been carefully overlooking, according to their invariable custom. But now the returned exiles in Petrograd took up the matter, and organized a parade to the American embassy, with a demand for the freeing of this “Muni”. The report, of course, came back to America--to the immense bewilderment of the American people, who had never heard of this “Muni” before. To Jimmie Higgins it seemed just the funniest joke on earth that a big labour-struggle should be on in San Francisco, and Americans should get their first news about it from Petrograd! Look! he would cry--how much real democracy there is in America, how much care for the working classes! So all that summer and autumn, while Jimmie Higgins slaved in the fields, getting in his country's wheat-crop, and then his country's corn crop, there was a song of joy and awakening excitement in his soul. Far over the seas men of his own kind were getting the reins of power into their hands, for the first time in the history of the world. It could not be long before here in America the workers would learn this wonderful lesson, would thrill to the idea that freedom and plenty might really be their portion. CHAPTER XV JIMMIE HIGGINS TURNS BOLSHEVIK I Winter was coming, and the farm-workers moved to the cities; but this year they did not go as down-and-out-o'-works--they went, each man a little kink. Jimmie wandered into the city of Ironton, and got himself a job in a big automobile shop at eight dollars a day, and set to work agitating for ten dollars. It was not that he had any need of the extra two dollars, of course, but merely because his first principle in life was to make trouble for the profit-system. The capitalist papers of this middle-Western metropolis were furiously denouncing working-men who struck “against their country” in war-time; Jimmie, on the other hand, denounced those who used “country” as camouflage for “boss” and made the war a pretext to deprive labour of its most precious right.