teach you how to smash the individual capitalist. I want to
teach you how to frame laws which will bring the wealth of this country
into a new and saner distribution. I want to teach you the folly of the
old ideas that because of the wretched conditions in which you live, the
better educated man, the man better equipped mentally and physically for
his job, must gather to himself the wealth and you must become his
slaves. What do you suppose, in the course of three or four
generations, produces men of different mental and physical calibre? I
will tell you. The circumstances of their bringing-up, the life they
have to lead, their education, their environment. What chance have you
under present conditions? None! For very shame, as the years pass on,
you operatives will be better paid. What will it amount to? A few
shillings a week more, the same life, the same anxieties, the same daily
grinding toil, brainless, machine-like, leading you nowhere because
there isn't a way out. There will still remain your masters; there
will still remain you, the men. Can't you see what it is that I am
aiming at? I want to make a great machine of all the industries of this
country. The man with the gift for figures will find himself in the
office, and the man with lesser brain power will find himself before a
machine. But the two will be working for one aim and one end. They
will both be parts of the machine, and for their livelihood they will
take what that machine produces, distributed in a scientific and exact
ratio. It's co-operation over again, you say? Very well, call it that.
Only I tell you why co-operation has failed up till now. It's because
you've been in too much of a hurry. I am going to appeal to you
presently, not for your own interests but in the interests of your
children and your children's children, because the better days that are
to come for you won't dawn yet awhile. It may be, even, that you will
be called upon to make sacrifices, instead of finding yourselves better
off. There are some great changes which time alone can govern."

"What about this strike?" some one shouted from the bottom of the
hall.

"You are quite right, sir," Maraton replied swiftly. "I've wandered a
little from my point. I think that the first thing I said to you was
that this strike, if it took place, would be like the pinprick on an
elephant's hide. I want to teach you how to stab!"

There was a murmur of voices--approving this time, at any ra