“That’s an old promise,” Weavel declared sturdily.

“What about the potteries?” Mr. Borden exclaimed.  “It’s six years since we had any sort of a dust-up, and my majority was the smallest of the lot of you, last election.  Something’s got to be done down my way.  My chaps won’t go paying in and paying in forever.  We’ve fifty-nine thousand pounds waiting, and the condition of our girl labour is beastly.”

“Iron comes next,” Weavel persisted stolidly.  “That’s been settled amongst ourselves.  And as for your fifty-nine thousand, Borden, what about our hundred and thirty thousand?  We shall all have to be lending up here, too, to work this thing properly.”

“Let’s get on,” Peter Dale proposed, rapping on the table.  “Now listen here, all of you.  What I propose is, if we’re satisfied with Mr. Maraton’s address to-night, as I’ve no doubt we shall be,” he added, bowing to Maraton with clumsy politeness, “that we appoint him kind of lecturer to the Unions, and we make out a sort of itinerary for him, to kind of pave the way, and then he gives one of these Chicago orations of his at the last moment in each of the principal centres.  We’d fix a salary—­no need to be mean about it—­and get to work as soon as this affair’s over.  And meanwhile, while this strike’s on, Mr. Maraton might address a few meetings in other centres on behalf of these fellows, and rope in some coin.  There are one or two matters we shall have to have an understanding about, however, and one as had better be cleared up right now.  I’ll ask you, Mr. Maraton, to explain to us just what you meant down at the Clarion the other night?  We weren’t expecting you there and you rather took us aback, and we didn’t find what you said altogether helpful or particularly lucid.  Now what’s this business about a universal strike?”

Maraton sat for a moment almost silent.  He looked down the table, along the line of faces, coarse faces most of them, of varying strength, plebeian, forceful here and there, with one almost common quality of stubbornness.  They were men of the people, all of them, men of the narrow ways.  What words of his could take them into the further land?  He raised his head.  He felt curiously depressed, immeasurably out of touch with these who should have been his helpmates.  The sight of Julia just then would have been a joy to him.

“Perhaps,” Maraton began, with a little sigh, “I had better first explain my own position.  You are each of you Members of Parliament for a particular district.  The interests of each of you are bound up in the welfare of the operatives who send you to Parliament.  It’s your job to look after them, and I’ve no doubt you do it well.  Only, you see, it’s a piecemeal sort of business to call yourselves the representatives of Labour in its broadest sense.  I belong more, I am afraid, to the school of theorists.  In my mind I bring all Labour together, all the toilers of the world who are slaves to the great Moloch, Capital.  You