He cursed his annoying and nudging wife a few times heartily, then began to make his acutely unbeautiful toilet. In the same small wheeled hotel capitalists, statesmen, matrons, and misses were dressing in quarters just as strait. Jake and his wife had always got in each other's way, but never more cumbersomely than now. Jake found his wife's stockings when he sought his socks. Her corset-strings seemed to be everywhere. Whatever he laid hold of brought along her corset. He thrust his head and arms into something white and came out of it sputtering: "That's your damned shimmy. Where's my damned shirt?" Somehow they made it at last, got dressed and washed somehow and left the caravansary. Mrs. Nuddle carried the heavier baggage. They had breakfast at the lunch-counter; then they went out and looked at the Capitol. It inspired in Jake's heart no national reverence. He said to his awestruck wife: "There's where that gang of robbers, the Congersmen, meet and agree on their hold-ups. They're all the hirelings of the capitalists. "They voted for this rotten war without consulting the people. They didn't dare consult 'em. They knew the people wasn't in favor of no such crime. But the Congersmen get their orders from Wall Street, and them brokers wanted the war because they owned so much stock that wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on unless the United States joined the Allies and collected for 'em off Germany." It was thus that Jake and his kind regarded the avalanche of horrific woe that German ambition spilled upon the world and kept rolling down from the mountain-tops of heaped-up munitions. It was thus that they contemplated the mangled villages of innocent Belgium, the slavery-drives in the French towns, the windrows of British dead, the increasing lust of conquest, which grew by what it fed on, till at last America, driven frantic by the endless carnage, took up belatedly the gigantic task of throwing back the avalanche across the mountain to the other side before it engulfed and ruined the world. While Europe agonized in torments unthinkable, immeasurable, and yet mysteriously endurable only because there was no escape visible, the Jake Nuddles, illiterate and literate, croaked their batrachian protest against capital, bewailed the lot of imaginary working-men, and belied the life of real working-men. Staring at the Capitol, which means so much nobility to him who has the nobility to understand the dream that raised it, he burlesqued its ideals. Cruel, corrupt, lazy, and sloven of soul, he found there what he knew best because it was his own. Aping a sympathy he could not feel, he grew maudlin: "So they drag our poor boys from their homes in droves and send 'em off to the slaughter-house in France--all for money! Anything to grind down the honest workman into the dust, no matter how many mothers' hearts they break!"