Dick had his notions. They were connected with an investigation he had been making on the quiet. His curiosity about where the boys in his club got the arguments they presented against munition making and selling had led him to look into the journals they read, particularly the foreign journals--Slovak, Bohemian, Italian, Polish. He discovered that they were all carrying a surprisingly similar series of articles, protesting on the highest moral grounds against the dragging of the workmen into such a business--making munition, forcing them to earn their bread by preparing destruction for their fellows, or going without it. He didn't like it and spoke to Ralph, translating to him the selections that he had put his hands on. "It's the same hand that does this, Ralph; what do you think?" "Why," said Ralph, "I've had that stuff offered me. I know all about it. There's a bunch of peacemakers in the East who are syndicating it, in the domestic as well as the foreign press, paying all the expenses. They say it's their contribution to the cause. The agent offered it to me here. They would not give me the names of the philanthropists. I told the agent that I didn't advertise justice, I advocated it. But, Dick, it's all right. They're just silly, mistaken in their way of getting at it. You cannot carry on advertising of this kind in this country but people get onto the source of it very soon, just as you have; and that puts an end to it. I told the man that offered me that stuff that would be the way of it." "Did Otto ever mention this to you, Ralph?" Ralph studied. "I believe he did once--asked me if I had ever heard of the scheme--if it had ever been offered to me. He said a newspaper friend of his in New York spoke to him about it. I told him what I've told you: that people who believed in these notions and wanted to get them over should come into the open with them. I don't take any stock in pacifists that don't work in the open." Dick told Cowder all he knew. "Proves nothing," he said, "but I don't like it." "Nor I," said Dick. When Labor's National Peace Council began to flourish, Dick couldn't get it out of his head that there was a connection between the two, that the humanitarian advertisers were the backers of the movement. He went to Ralph with the suggestion. That young man had thrown himself boldly into the campaign and he resented Dick's idea that there was something suspicious behind it.