"Hell, you think I'm so thick-headed I can't see both sides of the fence?" Andy grunted. "I wasn't speaking for my own class. It's speaking for itself every day--to the recruiting sergeant. I'm speaking to you as a thinking, feeling individual who sees himself being sucked into a whirlpool. I'm trying to point out to you in the most rational manner possible what the real situation is. You can't deny it. It exists. Why, if the bulk, even a working majority of the damn fools that call themselves men, had a few glimmerings of social and economic wisdom there wouldn't be any German or French or Russian or British armies in the field. Only a few handfuls of atavistic adventurers. I'm not by nature a humble, peaceful toiler. I'd just as soon as not fight for anything that's worth fighting for--and all the hard fighting isn't done with guns, either. All my life I've seen the show run by arrogant, power-proud people who aren't nearly so clever as they seem to be. They make a mess of things too often to be really clever. And the rest of us growl and knuckle down to our jobs. We're slaves, not so much to our masters, as to our own inertia, our own lack of intelligence, slaves to the common, well-nourished illusion that to get something for nothing is the solution for all our difficulties. We merit contempt. No one among the well-fed and the cultured who have never soiled their hands with common work has more impatience with the bovine mass than some of us who are of the mass. We lose faith in ourselves and our own kind--but our masters never lose faith in us--in our docility to fetch and carry. They know how to use us without our knowing how it's done. They tell us now that the Germans threaten our lives, our freedom, our country and its cherished institutions. That's true enough. But we risk our lives daily in industry with very much less freedom of choice in the matter than even primitive man had in pursuing his food, clothing, and shelter. What cherished institutions of ours are threatened that we should go five thousand miles to fight in a quarrel between Russians, Germans and French? "And still," Andy drummed on the polished bar with his finger tips, "in spite of my reasoned convictions I find myself as much of a herd animal as the rest. Logic tells me this row is the same old thing on a larger scale--an affair in which the have-nots will do the fighting as they do the work. But logic doesn't help me where I live, inside of me, when I see fellows I know, fellows I like, getting ready to go. The old tribal instincts that are stronger and deeper than civilization and industry keep stirring up in me, nagging at me. The flag--it's only a symbol. Patriotism, patriotic duty has only a hollow sound when I hear the phrase used. And still--something gets me--I don't know quite what it is--but it's there.