Can this be the same Hillquit who earlier in the trial broke out in the angry threat: "What we say to you, gentlemen: the contemplated act of this Assembly, if consummated, _will ... loosen the violent revolution_." ("New York Evening Sun," January 21, 1920.) Did he allude to some pink tea party? And perhaps the "school boys" Hillquit referred to are those by his pet institution poisoned and turned into degenerates in the bud of manhood, like poor Oscar Edelman, whose valedictory speech on graduating from a course in the Rand School of Social Science ran thus: "For us as students, Socialists and Labor Unionists, our work is laid out. We must help educate the workers of America so that their slogan, 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work' be replaced by the revolutionary slogan, 'abolition of the wage system.' ... In the great world-struggle which is taking place today, we must take active part.... The ideals which today inspire Debs and Lenine are the ideals which inspire us." (Lusk Committee evidence, quoted from "The National Civic Federation Review," July 30, 1919.) But of all the sublime performances of Hillquit, that which lays the brightest crown on his veracity was the answer he gave at Albany on February 17, 1920, to the long hypothetical question concerning the attitude of the Socialists should their friends of the Third International, the Bolsheviki, invade the United States. At this question the redoubtable Mr. Hillquit, according to the "New York Times" of February 18, 1920, "settled back in his chair and smiled" and said: "I should say that the Socialists of the United States would have no hesitancy whatsoever in joining forces with the rest of their countrymen to repel the Bolsheviki who would try to invade our country _and force a form of government upon our people which our people were not ready for and did not desire_." (Italics mine.) Had Hillquit stopped where the italics began he would have stretched our credulity to the utmost. But if "our people" meant to him American Socialists, we readily believe that invading Bolsheviki, coming to wrest the American dictatorship from our native talent, would find themselves and their undesirable "form of government" pitched into the sea by Hillquit and his crowd. Majority Socialist against Spartacide and Bolshevik against Menshivik--we have seen how one Socialist group repels the "form of government" forced by another. When we think of the heroic exploits of Hillquit in repelling foreign invaders from America about 1917-18, can we not imagine him hurling one of his deadly manifestoes at his Bolsheviki friends? No doubt when Comrade Martens, the vanguard of the invading Bolsheviki, stormed Hillquit's castle on Riverside Drive with a fee and a commission as "Councillor," the outraged patriot crashed a receipt in full against the invader's outstretched paw.