“You are not only right, but you are splendidly right, Mr. Cross,” Julian declared.  “It’s human talk, that.”

“It’s just a plain man’s words and thoughts,” was the simple reply.

“And yet,” Fenn complained, in his thin voice, “if I talk like that, they call me a pacifist, a lot of rowdies get up and sing `Rule Britannia’, and try to chivy me out of the hall where I’m speaking.”

“You see, there’s a difference, lad,” Cross pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking.  “You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle.  A full-blooded Englishman don’t like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we’ve got, any way and anyhow.  But that doesn’t alter the fact that there’s something wrong in the world when we’re driven to do this protecting business wholesale and being forced into murdering on a scale which only devils could have thought out and imagined.  It’s the men at the top that are responsible for this war, and when people come to reckon up, they’ll say that there was blame up at the top in the Government of every Power that’s fighting, but there was a damned sight more blame amongst the Germans than any of the others, and that’s why many a hundred thousand of our young men who’ve loathed the war and felt about it as I do have gone and done their bit and kept their mouths shut.”

“You cannot deny,” Fenn argued, “that war is contrary to Christianity.”

“I dunno, lad,” Cross replied, winking across the table at Julian.  “Seems to me there was a powerful lot of fighting in the Old Testament, and the Lord was generally on one side or the other.  But you and I ain’t going to bicker, Mr. Fenn.  The first decision this Council came to, when it embraced more than a dozen of us of very opposite ways of thinking, was to keep our mouths shut about our own ideas and stick to business.  So give me a fill of baccy from your pipe, and we’ll have a cup of coffee together.”

Julian’s pouch was first upon the table, and the Northumbrian filled his pipe in leisurely fashion.

“Good stuff, sir,” he declared approvingly, as he passed it back.  “After dinner I am mostly a man of peace—­even when Fenn comes yapping around,” he added, looking after the disappearing figure of the secretary.  “But I make no secret of this.  I tumbled to it from the first that this was a great proposition, this amalgamation of Labour.  It makes a power of us, even though it may, as you, Mr. Orden, said in one of your articles, bring us to the gates of revolution.  But it was all I could do to bring myself to sit down at the same table with Penn and his friend Bright.  You see,” he explained, “there may be times when you are forced into doing a thing that fundamentally you disapprove of and you know is wrong.