Get Workers and nationalism: Czech and German social democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918 1st Edition Beneš free all chapters
Get Workers and nationalism: Czech and German social democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918 1st Edition Beneš free all chapters
Get Workers and nationalism: Czech and German social democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918 1st Edition Beneš free all chapters
com
https://textbookfull.com/product/workers-and-
nationalism-czech-and-german-social-democracy-in-
habsburg-austria-1890-1918-1st-edition-benes/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-petrograd-workers-in-the-russian-
revolution-february-1917-june-1918-david-mandel/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-loucas/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/jewish-encounters-with-buddhism-in-
german-culture-between-moses-and-buddha-1890-1940-sebastian-musch/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/antifungal-therapy-second-edition-
ghannoum/
textbookfull.com
Brain Source Localization Using EEG Signal Analysis 1st
Edition Munsif Ali Jatoi
https://textbookfull.com/product/brain-source-localization-using-eeg-
signal-analysis-1st-edition-munsif-ali-jatoi/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/wearable-technology-for-robotic-
manipulation-and-learning-bin-fang/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-philosophical-progress-of-humes-
essays-margaret-watkins/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/pericyte-biology-in-disease-
alexander-birbrair/
textbookfull.com
Trauma Care Pre-Hospital Manual Ian Greaves
https://textbookfull.com/product/trauma-care-pre-hospital-manual-ian-
greaves/
textbookfull.com
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi
WO R K E R S A N D N AT I O N A L I S M
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi
Workers and
Nationalism
Czech and German Social Democracy
in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918
JAKUB S. BENEŠ
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Jakub S. Beneš 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942491
ISBN 978–0–19–878929–1
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi
Acknowledgments
This book project began to take shape soon after I decided to become a professional
historian—an arduous, deeply rewarding, and often unpredictable path to take.
From the outset, I could not have had a better PhD supervisor and mentor than
William Hagen. Uncommonly generous with his time, always both critical and
encouraging, patient and judicious, Bill has consistently pushed me to see the big
picture, and at the same time to enter the life worlds of my subjects with humility
and sympathy. His support has helped sustain this project from the beginning.
I also benefited immensely from having Edward Dickinson and Ted Margadant on
my dissertation committee. Ed and Ted asked tough questions that have in many
ways guided me as I moved forward on the project after taking my degree, and
encouraged me to think of this story as a European one, not just a Czech and
German one.
I have incurred debts to a number of people during the research for this book.
I am grateful to Luboš Velek for his advice on sources and for recklessly approach-
ing me in the Chodovec reading room one summer afternoon in 2008. As I wiled
through the seasons in archives in Prague, Vienna, and Brno, struggling to hear the
voices of the workers who trod the thoroughfares outside a century before, many
archivists assisted me. I am particularly thankful to the staff of the Czech National
Archives, to Günter Müller, curator of the Lebensgeschichtesammlung at the
University of Vienna’s Institute of Social and Economic History, and to Katarzyna
Ewa Lassnig at the Association for Labor Movement History in Vienna. I got my
bearings in Prague thanks to my relatives, the Brejcha family, and in Vienna to the
Valeš family and Honza Vykoukal. Finding a comfortable place to live can, indeed,
facilitate more focused work. In addition, I am very appreciative of the generous
support that I received from several funding bodies, without which this project
would never have gotten off the ground: the American Council of Learned
Societies, the Central European History Society, and the UC Berkeley Institute for
European Studies.
This book benefited incalculably from lively discussions in diverse settings—
seminar rooms, conference panels, pizza joints in Davis and Berkeley, cafés and
beer halls in central Europe, and curry houses and pubs in Britain. My interloc-
utors over the past years are too numerous to list in full. I would like to thank
the participants of the Kroužek at UC Berkeley and to my year cohort at UC
Davis that met on Thursday evenings in autumn 2006 to talk theory and meth-
ods, often continuing our discussions for long hours—particularly Chad
Anderson and myself—after the seminar finished. Their thoughts and feedback
have been indispensable. A few Kroužek comrades have been part of my life on
both continents and have helped me think through the knottiest questions that
cropped up in my research and writing. My thanks to John Connelly, Sarah
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi
viii Acknowledgments
Cramsey, Mark Keck-Szajbel, and especially Michael Dean. In the UK, I have
been very fortunate to discuss my work with Jonathan Kwan, Jonathan Gumz,
and Klaus Richter.
I am also deeply indebted to those selfless colleagues who read parts or all of the
manuscript, saving me from mistakes, and at the same time giving brilliant advice:
Geoff Eley and Rudolf Kučera in particular, as well as Dick Geary and Stefan
Arvidsson. I would also like to thank the assiduous and constructive reviewers for
Oxford University Press who subsequently, in various ways, revealed their identi-
ties—Chad Bryant, Pieter Judson, and Nancy Wingfield. Their incisive comments
made my arguments more convincing and my writing clearer. The support of my
editor at Oxford University Press, Robert Faber, along with his diligent staff, has
made the production phase as smooth and enjoyable as possible.
Finally, I owe the greatest debt to my family. A constant source of support and
inspiration, I could not have done it without them. With affection I thank my
siblings Era and Martin and my parents, Jan and Vera, as well as—not least—our
stouthearted Airedale terrier Nestor, who almost lived to see the manuscript com-
pleted. And maybe most of all to you, Maja: you have been there the whole time.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
List of Maps xiii
A Note on Names xv
3. Storms of November 99
Suffrage as Revolutionary Utopia 101
The Argument of the Streets 115
Seizing the Nation 131
Coda: May 1907 139
x Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
A Note on Names
Wherever possible, I have used the English name for a city (Prague, Vienna,
Cracow) or a local name that is familiar enough in English usage, for example
Brno, Klagenfurt, Pilsen, and Ostrava as opposed to Brünn, Celovec, Plzeň, or
Mährisch Ostrau/Ostrawa. In the case of multiethnic towns for which no famil-
iar English name exists, I have generally given multiple names, beginning with
the name assigned by the country in which it is found today; thus: České
Budějovice/Budweis, Liberec/Reichenberg, and Eisenkappel/Železna Kapla.
I have used only one name in cases where only one was in common usage, for
instance Kladno and Hainfeld, and in most cases where the difference was negli-
gible, such as Kolín (vs Kolin). I generally use the terms “Social Democrat”
(capitalized to denote the official party name) and “socialist” interchangeably,
even though the Czech National Socials sometimes referred to themselves as
socialists as well, as did—more justifiably—the anarchists who constituted a tiny,
if not insignificant group in Habsburg Austria after their heyday in the 1880s.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/10/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/10/16, SPi
Introduction
Socialism, Nationalism, and Democracy
1 Otto Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, trans. Joseph O’Donnell
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 98. This was a reworking of his recently com-
pleted doctoral thesis in jurisprudence at the University of Vienna. On Bauer’s biography see, Ernst
Hanisch, Der große Illusionist: Otto Bauer (1881–1938) (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011).
2 Hans Mommsen, “Otto Bauer, Karl Renner und die sozialdemokratische Nationalpolitik in
Österreich von 1905 bis 1914,” in Keith Hitchins, ed., Studies in East European Social History, Vol. 1
(Leiden: Brill, 1977).
3 Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question 1913 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub.
House, 1947); Helmut Konrad, “Sozialdemokratische und kommunistische Lösungsansätze zur
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/10/16, SPi
This book is not about Marxist theories of nationalism, but rather about how
the workers that made up one of Europe’s largest Social Democratic movements
came to embrace nationalism. It is about the historical context that persuaded
Bauer of the meaningfulness of nations and national consciousness to the indus-
trial working classes. Electoral democratization was critical this context. On May
14 and 23, 1907, shortly before Bauer’s book came out, the first elections were
held on the basis of universal, equal, direct, and secret male suffrage to the parlia-
ment of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy. The elections resulted in an
immense victory for the Social Democratic party, the only political movement
cutting across ethnic-national boundaries in a political culture increasingly riven
by intransigent nationalism. Austria’s Czech- and German-speakers predominated
in the movement since they inhabited the regions of the monarchy that had expe-
rienced rapid industrialization since the 1860s. Of the eighty-seven parliamentary
seats won by Social Democracy, fifty fell to Austria German candidates and twenty-
four to Czechs.4 Winning nearly 23 percent of the popular vote in a state that
remained mostly agrarian up to its demise in 1918, and emerging as the largest
single party in parliament (though an alliance between Christian Socials and
German clerical parties overtook them numerically), Social Democrats viewed the
1907 elections as an epochal breakthrough.
Bauer recognized that many in his party also perceived the victory in distinctly
national terms. The May 15 headline of the Prague socialist daily Právo lidu (The
People’s Right) read “The nation—that’s us!”5 In addition to apparently paving the
way for far-reaching social reform, the clear majorities of Czech- and German-
speaking voters that turned out for Social Democracy seemed to fill with socialist
content the national categories into which many contemporaries divided Austrian
society. To socialists, this was a profound vindication of their policies against the
attacks of middle-class nationalist parties, which had interpreted their internation-
alism either as a sign that they had no nation—captured in the succinct Reich
German epithet “fellows without a fatherland”—or that they had betrayed the
nation. Instead, socialists could now feel that they were the rightful leaders of their
respective nations.
Yet the progressive potential that Bauer attached to this democratic moment
was lost in subsequent years. Czech and German Social Democrats clashed over
national autonomy in political and trade union organizations, as well as over issues
that middle-class nationalist politicians in the Habsburg Monarchy had long
championed: bilingual signs, the national composition of the state civil service, and
national minority school rights in nationally mixed locales. Disputes came to a head
in 1911 with the autonomist Czech party cutting all organizational ties with the
nationalen Frage in Ost- und Mitteleuropa,” in Helmut Konrad, ed., Arbeiterbewegung und Nationale
Frage in den Nachfolgestaaten der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Europa-Verlag, 1993); Yuri Slezkine,
“The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,”
Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 414–52; Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth
Century (New York: Vintage, 1998), 49–50.
4 The remainder went to Polish, Ruthenian, and Italian candidates.
5 “Národ—to jsme my!” Právo lidu, May 15, 1907, 1.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/10/16, SPi
6 Jan Galandauer, Od Hainfeldu ke vzniku KSČ: české dělnické hnutí v letech 1889–1921 (Prague:
Academia, 1986), 37.
7 Bernard Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation,” Critical Review 10, no. 2 (1996): 193–211; Erica
Benner, “Nationalism: Intellectual Origins,” in John Breuilly, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History
of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 37–42.
Visit https://textbookfull.com
now to explore a rich
collection of eBooks, textbook
and enjoy exciting offers!
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/10/16, SPi
8 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995),
3–5, ch. 6.
9 John Schwarzmantel, “Nationalism and Socialist Internationalism,” in Breuilly, ed., The Oxford
Handbook of the History of Nationalism, 641.
10 On events and structures, see William H. Sewell Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social
Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 100, 227–9.
11 On “zones of contact”, see Lukáš Fasora, Dělník a měšťan: vývoj jejich vzájemných vztahů na
příkladu šesti moravských měst 1870–1914 (Brno: Centrum pro studium demokracie a kultury, 2010).
12 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19.
13 The following works see nationalism’s rise as a more or less gradual process accompanying mod-
ernization: Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis
of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge:
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/10/16, SPi
Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1982); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991); and, synthesizing much of these arguments, Eric J.
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
14 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Revised Ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994),
xi, xx–xxi.
15 Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), introduction; Alfrun
Kliems, Martina Winkler, eds., Sinnstiftung durch Narration in Ost-Mittel-Europa: Geschichte—
Literatur—Film (Berlin: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2005), especially Martina Winkler, “Clios Art
zu dichten: Erzählkonventionen in Nationalhistorien”; Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas, Andrew
Mycock, eds., Narrating the Nation. Representations in History, Media and the Arts (New York:
Berghahn, 2008); Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); David L. Cooper, Creating the Nation: Identity and
Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-century Russia and Bohemia (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2010).
16 Hayden White offered the pioneering and perhaps most sophisticated version of this argument:
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1973), The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). In the latter volume White states, “narrative, far from
being merely a form of discourse that can be filled with different contents, real or imaginary as the case
may be, already possesses a content prior to any given actualization of it in speech or writing.” (p. xi).
17 Hank Johnston, ed., Culture, Social Movements, and Protest (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 13–14.
See especially Francesca Polletta, “Storytelling in Social Movements” in this volume.
18 Stephen Ingle, Narratives of British Socialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15,
141–2.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/10/16, SPi
the often rousing orations heard in socialist pubs, meeting halls, and in the streets.
Records of such expression, which figure prominently here, alongside more famil-
iar sources, appeared only exceptionally in previous works that explored the
social-economic preconditions of nationalist conflict or probed the nationalist
convictions of various high-ranking socialist leaders.
Hans Mommsen’s 1963 study, for instance, which remains unsurpassed in its
breadth, underscored economic competition among the rising national bourgeoi-
sies; the non-German middle classes were particularly resentful of the dominance
of German and German-Jewish capital. He made much of coinciding national
and class tensions in some industrial centers, which pitted workers of one nation-
ality against employers of another. Friction also occurred during the in-migration
of unorganized workers of one nationality to an industrial area populated by
organized workers of another nationality, with the former subjecting the latter to
wage pressure as potential strikebreakers.23 In the 1870s and 1880s, the early
workers’ movement, in spite of these unfavorable social conditions, gravitated
toward an economically grounded internationalism. But from the 1890s, Social
Democracy’s organizational growth led, in Mommsen’s account, to the rising
influence of petty bourgeois elements, especially in the Czech party, which
embroiled the party in prestige-driven nationalist competition.24 Most social his-
torians studying Habsburg Austrian Social Democracy followed his methodology,
combining an emphasis on social-economic structures with an analysis of organ-
izational disputes among party and trade union leaders.25 The main lesson for
Marxian scholars from the 1960s to the 1980s was that Austria-Hungary’s eco-
nomic backwardness made destructive petty bourgeois nationalism into an irre-
sistible force that possessed “mass psychological” allure for the working classes.26
A number of worthy Czech studies written during the Communist era counter-
balanced Mommsen’s judgment that nationalism affected the empire’s Slavic
workers more than the G erman-speaking ones, but did not present a substantially
different approach.27 In all these accounts, organizational disputes exacerbated
deleterious bourgeois influence on key socialist leaders, who were responsible for
activating nationalist sentiment among the working masses. Ordinary workers’
attraction to the national idea was largely taken for granted but rarely explained.
The virtual absence of cultural history in previous works on nationalism and
socialism in Habsburg Austria made it exceedingly difficult to do this. While
authors on the subject agreed that the reverberations of the first Russian Revolution
in 1905 and 1906 along with the first elections based on universal male suffrage
in 1907 heightened the nationalism of industrial workers, they could not con-
vincingly say why this was the case.28
This book offers a much more culturalist answer to the question of how workers
in an immense and dynamic Social Democratic movement became ethnic nation-
alists. In doing so, it builds on two major recent historiographical trends in the
history of east central Europe. One has witnessed the rediscovery of the working
class as an important site of historical experience and political mobilization. In part
this has flowed from a reconceptualization of class itself. The old notion that class
and class consciousness deterministically and inevitably arose from changes in pro-
ductive relations had a longer career in central and eastern Europe, particularly
under Communism, than it did in western Europe. Already in 1963, E.P. Thompson
proposed that the English working class made itself through self-definition and
self-demarcation (that is, through culture) as much as it was made by the onset of
capitalist industrialization. With the rise of cultural history in the 1980s, a number
of scholars altogether abandoned the socioeconomic framing of class—the irreduc-
ible social “experience” upon which, for Thompson, the cultural construction of
class was predicated—and regarded class itself as a cultural category, or a language
for conjuring an imagined collective into being, or even a narrative device.29
Perhaps most usefully, Geoff Eley and Keith Nield have sought to combine the
Thompsonian social and discursive approaches to class by defining it as a cultural
and ideological postulate that is nonetheless powerful because it speaks to “demon-
strable social facts.”30
Several scholars working on the Habsburg lands have in practice deployed this
approach, abandoning the materialist determinism of Communist-era historiography
Contemporary Europe (1848–1945) (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1979). While the heavily ideological cli-
mate in which they worked obliged such scholars to identify baleful currents of “revisionism” and
“opportunism,” they steered away from oversimplified dichotomies of proto-Leninism versus “incorrect”
trajectories (everything else), typical of the Stalinized 1950s and works such as Jiří Doležal, Jan Beránek,
Ohlas první ruské revoluce v českých zemích (Prague: Naše Vojsko, 1955).
28 Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie; Marlis Sewering-Wollanek, Brot oder Nationalität?
Nordwestböhmische Arbeiterbewegung im Brennpunkt der Nationalitätenkonflikte (1889–1911) (Marburg:
Herder-Institut, 1994), 202, 224–5; Marina Cattaruzza, Sozialisten an der Adria. Plurinationale
Arbeiterbewegung in der Habsburgermonarchie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2011), 15, 138–9.
29 For a discussion of these debates, see Geoff Eley, Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History:
What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
30 Eley, Nield, The Future, 167. This is similar to the notion of “dispositions” elaborated in Ira
Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Katznelson,
Aristide R. Zolberg, eds., Working Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and
the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 17–19.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
gallant officer, sir, he turned out to be arterwards—when
he was sailin’ master on the Colossus. Did you ever see,
sir, such a ornhandy ship for tackin’ as the old Colossus?
If Mr. Forrester hadn’t been a rale sailor, he’d ’a’ got
hisself in trouble all the time with that old three-decker.”
The old sailor paused slightly at this word, and the 157
officer and the former captain of the maintop looked
each other squarely in the eye. The boy Dicky Stubbs,
who had a bright glance, gazed first at one and then at
the other, wondering what it all was about. After a little
pause Jack Bell continued:—
“Well, then,” said Captain Forrester, “to leave Jack Bell 160
and come to your own affairs. When I land you to-
morrow morning I shall ask the authorities to give you
the run of the town of Newport, but not to let you go
outside. I think I can contrive it through the admiral,
who is my friend. And how about this youngster here?”
“Didn’t you hear the cap’n tell you to pipe up, you 161
mutinous brat?”
163
CHAPTER II.
A GALLANT RESCUE.
The captain’s gig had put off from the ship with the 164
captain, bound ashore, and was far behind the
midshipman’s boat. The young midshipman steered
straight for the landing-place, but he knew nothing of
the tides and currents of the harbor. The fierce wind
was against them, and he suddenly found the boat too
close to the shore, and fast nearing a ledge of sunken
rocks, around which the waves were boiling. As he half-
rose from his seat the boat lurched violently and he
suddenly lost his balance; in another moment he was
jerked overboard and disappeared. A cry went up from
every man in the boat except Jack Bell. It was not a
mere everyday fall overboard, but a fall amid sharp-
pointed rocks and dangerous eddies. Before the echo of
that cry had died over the water, Jack Bell had kicked
off his shoes, peeled off his jacket, and had plunged
into the icy water after the young midshipman.
Jack Bell had dived exactly over the spot where young 165
Forrester had disappeared. In a minute or two he came
up, but alone. At this the agonized father covered his
face and groaned. But after a few long breaths Jack
dived again. This time when he rose a great shout went
up—he had young Forrester in his arms.
“He’s all right, sir,” cheerily called out Jack Bell, not 166
stopping in his rubbing. “He’s wuth all the dead reefers
betwixt Newport and Chiny. He got a whack on his head
from some o’ them jagged rocks, and he just fainted like
—but he’s a-comin’ to fast, sir.”
“I thank ’ee, sir, most respectful for ’em, and I don’t 169
mean to hurt your feelin’s by refusin’; but I can’t take
money for savin’ anybody’s life—and leastways from
you, Cap’n Forrester—as was”— Jack Bell paused,
smiled knowingly, and then continued: “This ’ere boy
sings a song called ‘Old Shipmates.’”
“No, sir, I thank you; but I could not accept money from 171
anyone. What I did was very little, and what my boy did
was still less. I am glad, though, we were able to do
that little.”
“I have just got him back after he ran away. I have not
had time to think; but there is always work hereabouts
for a good strong boy like Dicky.”
175
CHAPTER III.
DICKY’S PATRIOTISM.
____sea
____be
____shore
____gore
____sail
____hail
How glad was Dicky at that moment that he had made 181
the promise! His mother had asked him and he had
done it without giving it any particular thought; but
when it came to saving him from drinking the king’s
health, Dicky’s patriotic soul rejoiced that he had so
good an excuse.
That night when Jack Bell came in for his usual chat on
the settle, he told Dicky: “You’re right, boy, and if it’s
too hard a pull for you and your mammy to pay for the
winder, why, Jack Bell has got some of the rhino and
you’re welcome to it, for I see how you stuck up to your
promise and to your country.”
“Here comes that Stubbs boy as cost me five shilling for 184
a glazier’s bill. If it warn’t that his mother’s a widder, I’d
be after him, I can tell you. But look out, you young
scamp, if ever you get to wreckin’ my premises again,
I’ll get after you as sure as shootin’. Do you mind that?”
185
CHAPTER IV.
AN IMPORTANT ERRAND.
“Yes, sir,” answered the widow, all in a flutter. “It mayn’t 186
seem such a steady business for a boy, but the times
are so hard I can’t find anything else for him to do, and
he makes a very good living and brings all his money to
me.”
“His employment will answer very well for the present,”
replied the squire, “and when times become more
settled no doubt you can find honorable work for him.
What I came to see you about to-night was in
connection with him. Is there any danger of being
overheard?”
For answer the widow rose and bolted the door of the
cottage and—rare luxury!—lighted two tallow candles.
Then the squire continued:
At that moment they both heard Dicky and Jack Bell 188
fumbling at the latch. The widow rose and let them in,
then bolted the door again.
“Now let me read you the letter I wish the lad to carry,”
said the Squire, putting on his great gold spectacles,
and taking a letter from his pocket. “Suppose your boy
is stopped. Let him at once produce this letter, and if
the British can find out anything from it, they are
cleverer than I take it.”
189
My dear Sir,—
I am,
Your Friend and Obedient Servant,
WENTWORTH STAVERS.
Jack Bell’s jaw dropped and Dicky almost rolled on the 191
floor in his surprise, while his mother took the letter
and, counting the lines, saw how the information
conveyed in it was so different from what appeared on
the surface. Presently Jack Bell recovered himself
enough to bring his hand down on the table with a
thwack that made the candles jump and everybody in
the room jump, too.
The Squire then went out and the widow and Jack Bell
and Dicky sat and looked at each other, the widow
unmindful of the extravagance of burning two candles
when there was no distinguished company.
194
CHAPTER V.
AN ADVENTURE WITH THE REDCOATS.
The Squire gave him the letter before several of the 195
servants, without any extraordinary charges of
carefulness, merely telling him to deliver it with his own
hands to Mr. Josiah Barton, of Tiverton, and to return as
soon as possible, when he would receive two shillings—
and not to ride Blackberry too hard.