"At the same time, Abe," Morris remarked, "the Germans make things
pretty secret when they want to, otherwise how could the Kaiser have
kept that mutiny under his chest for over a couple of months?"
"And you could take it from me, Mawruss," Abe said, "before Michaelis
let it out in the Reichstag, he might just so well have stopped in at
the _Lokal Anzeiger_ office on his way down-town and inserted a couple
of lines or so under the head of 'Situations Wanted Males.'"
"Why, I thought you said a Prime Minister never gets fired," Morris
said.
"Prime Ministers is one thing and Chancellors another, Mawruss," Abe
told him.
"Then I imagine this here Michaelis must be putting in a lot of time
nowadays going over his contract to see if he's got any come-back
against the party of the first part in case that crook fires him,"
Morris said.
"Well, he can keep on looking till he finds another job," Abe replied,
"because the Kaiser is like a lot of other highwaymen in the cutting-up
trade, Mawruss. To them fellers the first and most important thing about
a contract is the loopholes, y'understand, and after that's fixed they
don't care what goes into it, which you take that contract of
Michaelis's and I bet yer that a police-court lawyer could drive an
armored tank through them paragraphs which is supposed to hold the
Kaiser, y'understand, whereas if _Michaelis_ wanted to get out of it,
Mawruss, he could go to work and hire Messrs. Hughes, Brandeis,
Stanchfield, Hughes & Stanchfield, supposing there was _Gott soll huten_
such a firm of lawyers, and they wouldn't be able to find so much as a
comma out of place for him."
"And as a good German, Abe, Michaelis would be awful disappointed if
they did," Morris said, "because that's the way the Germans feel toward
the Kaiser. He robs 'em, he murders 'em, and he starves their wives and
children to death, just so him and his family could run the country, and
them poor Heinies says to one another: 'That's the kind of a kaiser to
have! A big strong man which he don't give a nickel for nobody! He's a
wonder, all right, and if we didn't have a feller like that at the head
of the country I don't know how we would be able to stand all the
trouble that cutthroat and his crook family is causing us--Heaven bless
them.'"
"The hopeless part of it is," Abe commented, "that there's no way of
putting a nation of ninety million people in a lunatic asylum, even if
there was an asylum big enough to hold them, which there ain't,
Mawruss."
"And as much as you sympathize with a lunatic, you can't have him going
around loose, Abe," Morris said, "so what are we going to do about it?"
"Well, we're trying hard to shut 'em up in Germany again," Abe declared,
"and after we've got them there, Mawruss, I am willing to stand my share
of the expense that the war should go on long enough to give them
lunatics a little home treatment, y'understand, and by home treatment,
Mawruss, I mean not only treating the lunatics themselves, but also
treating their homes," Abe continued, growing red in the face at the
thought of it, "which I only hope that I live long enough to see a
moving picture of German homes the same like I seen moving pictures of
French homes and Belgian homes, and if that don't sweat the Kaiser-mania
out of their systems they are crazy for keeps."