Long ago that old gray man—when in his excitable youth—had marched proudly under the “Stars and Stripes” on gory battlefields, risking all, all, to defend “his country,” and his dear “Old Glory.” Once, he told me, the flag was reddened with his own blood.... But now “Old Glory” mocked him. Captains of industry, capitalists, industrial Caesars, had captured the flag and with devilish craftiness used that same flag to defend their industrial despotism. Sons and grandsons of veterans of the Civil War were now shrewdly flattered and bribed into the ignoble rôle of Russianizing America. Sons and grandsons were becoming Cossacks, and they cursed his gray hairs for demanding of American capitalists a few more pennies a day for ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-housed women and children in the dismal homes of the miners.... A cursing Cossack wearing khaki and flying the flag virtually spat in the old veteran’s face. “A cold-blooded organization that [Pennsylvania] State Constabulary.”[175] When Decoration Day comes, when the Fourth of July is to be celebrated, when “patriotic” displays are to be made—at such times—bankers, big business men, politicians and statesmen—many of these—should put on black masks, wrap themselves in black flags, and sneak (blushingly, if possible) down into dark cellars and stay there during the celebration—with their memories crowded with soldiers, widows and orphans brutally wronged,—with their memories crowded with congresses corrupted, treasuries looted, lands stolen, charters, privileges and “good things” shamelessly raped from the unseeing public while brave but deluded working men agonized on bloody battlefields. And on such days the working class should shout less and think more. “The man on horseback” should have some special thought. And the working class are thinking today more than ever before. And, thinking, they begin to see that hand-clapping, fife-playing, drum-beating and buncombe from a prostituted orator are neither freedom nor justice, nor even the _sign_ of such; but are, rather, just what Mark Twain called them[176]—a “bastard patriotism.”