rcella. Presently it was as though she had passed into
Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves. It
would be a success this speech--it was a success! The House was gained,
was attentive. A case long familiar to it in portions and fragments,
which had been spoilt by violence and discredited by ignorance, was
being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent--with
brilliancy, moderation, practical detail--moderation above all! From the
slight historical sketch, with which the speech opened, of the English
"working day," the causes and the results of the Factory Acts--through
the general description of the present situation, of the workman's
present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for
State control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, and the
effects it might be expected to have on the workman himself, on the
great army of the "unemployed," on wages, on production, and on the
economic future of England--the speaker carried his thread of luminous
speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point
he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the
propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of
detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist
terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions
of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the
regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated
to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life,
possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of
leisure, knowledge, and delight--the crowded benches before and behind
him grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of
"flights," except from its chartered masters. But this young man had
earned his flight; and they heard him patiently. For the rest, the
Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in
the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a
deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in
the utterances of the Labour men.

"'The mildest mannered man' _et cetera!_" said a smiling member of the
late Government to a companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton
sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up
of a crowded House, and the end of a successful speech which people are
ea