“We have statistics,” Borrowdean began.

“Damn statistics!” Mannering interrupted.  “I have juggled with figures myself in the old days, and I know how easy it is.  So do you, and so does Redford.  This is what I want to put to you.  The tragedy is there.  Perhaps those who have faced it and come back again to tell of their experiences have been a little hysterical—­the horror of it has carried them away.  They may not have adopted the most effectual means of making the world understand, but it is there.  I have seen it.  A thousandth part of this misery in a country with which we had nothing to do, and no business to interfere, and we should be having mass meetings at Exeter Hall, and making general asses of ourselves all over the country, shrieking for intervention, wasting a whole dictionary of rhetoric, and probably getting well snubbed for our pains.  And because the murders are by slow poison instead of with steel, because they are in our own cities and amongst our own people, we accept them with a sort of placid satisfaction.  You, Lord Redford, speak of character and enunciate social laws, and Borrowdean will argue that after all the trade of the country is not so bad as it might be, and will make an epigram on the importation of sentimentality into politics.  In plain words, Lord Redford, we, as a party, are asleep to what is going on.  One statesman has recognized it, and proposed a startling and drastic remedy.  We attack the remedy tooth and nail, but we place forward no counter proposition.  It is as though a dying man were attended by two doctors, one of whom has prepared a remedy which the other declines to administer without suggesting one of his own.  It is not a logical position.  The medicine may not cure, but let the man have his chance of life.”

“Your simile,” Lord Redford said, “assumes that the man is dying.”

“I have seen the mark of death upon his face,” Mannering answered.  “The men who are traitors to their country to-day are those who, healthy enough themselves, talk causeless and shallow optimism which is fed alone by their own prosperity.  The doctrine of Christ is the care of others.  If you do not believe, the sick-room is open also to you; go there unprejudiced, and with an open mind, and you will come away as I have come away.”

“Must we take it, then, Mannering,” Lord Redford said, gravely, “that you are prepared to support the administering of the medicine you spoke of?”

Mannering was silent for a moment.

“At least,” he said, “I am not going to be amongst those who cry out against it and offer nothing themselves.  I am going to analyze that medicine, and if I see a chance of life in it I shall say, let us run a little risk, rather than stand by inactive, to look upon the face of death.  In other words, I become for the moment a passive figure in politics so far as this question is concerned.”

Lord Redford held out his hand.