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