﻿Direct Action To Fill Barrel With Sowbelly 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
A pension for every person 70 or better. 
But some of those old jiggers have a million bucks. 
That’s all right; we’ll treat all alike.” 
But some of them won’t take a pension. 
Oh, yes, they will; we’ll ask them to throw the million bucks in the pot. They’re old and won’t need it. Then we’ll pay the pension from the pot. 
But it isn’t fair to give $22.50 a month for a million bucks. 
Hush! Someone might hear you and you’d have your axe in the sling for first degree treason. Can’t you see you’re discrediting our pension system, the dearest thing we have—a work of love and just enough surly remarks to make the venerated “old” feel they escaped with their lives. Hush! Maybe after a few old skinflints have hit the pot with a million dollars we’ll increase the pension to $23.00 even. 
Being old and having no teeth they don’t have to buy no tooth paste. 
Good gosh! don’t the government supply them with teeth? 
There you go again. What in the name of goof usage would they need teeth for on $22.50 a month—liquids, my friend, onion soup, gas, electric light, rent, hm—and they can save on the Brillo having no teeth to polish and they’re too weak to polish ‘em anyhow. 
But when we get this system working and a few billionaires hit the pot with the quoits we’ll buy the old people a pound or two of mutton each week—it helps to pass the time. They can lay their toothless gums on a chunk of mutton and suck for hours at a stretch. Of course, if there be any who thinks this isn’t the finest form of civilization we stand to be corrected. 
Regardless of all the protestations the contrary the munition plant in Czechoslovakia is what the powers were after. They figure they’ll have to pull a gun one of these days in order to get their breakfast.  
In fact, the munition plant was the inspiration for the creation of Czechoslovakia. Selah! 
Aren’t truth, stinging? And thinking? Mize babies— fighting for breakfast like pigs in a trough. I tremble to think what would happen if Crackerdown Johnson, the hard-riding chevassier, should jump in there also. 
Uncle Sam could turn a pretty penny by buying the darn thing and blowing it to smithereens. Fools shouldn’t be trusted with guns. They grab for their neighbor’s land and yet they can’t handle the land they already have. 
What’s the remedy? Bigger and better nuthouses 
 
Nowadays if a nation wants to fight it has to use cannons 73 feet long, 42 inches bore and range of 150 miles—so as to be on the safe side. Entertainment like crimes of Sebastopol, Plevar and Sedan-Metz would today seem like a field of girl scouts. 
And so it goes in this work-a-day world. Bigger, if not better instruments of persuasion and devastation are being used. 
But I find the workers still use the old fashioned antique methods of prayer and political pleading. Which only goes to show they are paragons of peace and virtue that passeth modern understanding. We find labor leaders down on one knee, ears scaping the gravel, pleading, “Look, see, place your blessing upon my silver locks.” 
What good Is that blessing going to do in a showdown? No good whatsoever. You’ll need a One Big Union—the age of the beanblower is flown. 

Now that human welfare has been introduced into war making we may expect an epidemic of politeness to follow, as to wit: 
“We regret that we cannot be responsible for loss of coats, hats or personal property in this battle.” General Harikari. 
And the gunner will say as he lets fly with a half of ton of scrap iron: 
“This hurts me more than it does you.”