Social problems -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
And so it was that Jimmie Higgins at last made his escape from his
tormentors. Jimmie doesn't know anything about the Russian Jew,
Kalenkin, any more; he could not tell the secret if he wanted to, so
they have given up testing his conscience, and they treat him
kindly, and have succeeded in persuading him that he is out of the
trap. Therefore he is a good beast--he crawls about on all fours,
and eats his food out of a tin platter without using his gnawed-off
fingers. He still has torturing pains in the arm-joints, but he does
not mind them so much, because, being a beast, he suffers only the
pain of the moment; he does not know that he is going to suffer
to-morrow, nor worry about it. He is no longer one of those who
“look before and after and pine for what is not”. He is a “good
doggie”, and when you pat him on the head he rubs against you and
whines affectionately.
Poor, mad Jimmie Higgins will never again trouble his country; but
Jimmie's friends and partisans, who know the story of his
experiences, cannot be thus lightly dismissed by Society. In the
industrial troubles which are threatening the great democracy of the
West, there will appear men and women animated by a fierce and
blazing bitterness; and the great democracy of the West will marvel
at their state of mind, unable to conceive what can have caused it.
These rebellious ones will be heard quoting to the great democracy
the words of its greatest democrat, spoken in solemn warning during
the slaughter and destruction of the Civil War: “If God will that it
continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and
fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop
of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the
sword, as it was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be
said, 'The judgements of the Lord are true and righteous
altogether.'”
THE END
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Jimmie Higgins, by Upton Sinclair
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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