in the valley and up on the hillside,
were rows of lights and the flare of furnaces soon to be quenched. Even
that little group of hard, unimaginative men who stood with Maraton upon
the platform felt the strange thrill of the tense and swelling throng
gathered together with this inspiring background.

It seemed to Maraton himself, as he stood there listening to the roar of
welcoming voices, as though all their white faces were gathered into
one, the prototype of suffering humanity, the sad, hollow-checked,
hollow-eyed victim of birth and heritage. His voice seemed to swell
that night to something greater than its usual volume; some peculiar
gift of penetration seemed to have been accorded him. A hundred
thousand men heard his passionate prayer to them. They were
hard-featured, hard-minded Yorkshiremen, most of them, but they never
forgot.

"You will get the half a crown a week which your leaders demand,"
Maraton told them. "Your masters--may God forgive me for using the
word!--will pay to that extent. But--if there is any justice beyond
this world, how, indeed, will they meet the debt built upon your
sufferings, your cramped lives, and the graves of your little children.
That half a crown a week, I say, will come to you. Don't dare, any of
you, to be satisfied when it does come. It isn't a few shillings only
that are owing to you. It's another social system, a rearrangement of
your whole scheme of life, under which you and your children, and your
children's children, may live with the dignity and freedom due to that
strange and common gift of life which beats in your pulses and in mine.
I am here to-night to show you the way to that extra half-crown, but I
don't want you for one moment to think that these small increases in
wages represent the end and aim of myself and those who share my
beliefs. Your day may not see it, nor mine, but history for the last
thousand years has shown us the slow emancipation of the peoples of the
world. There are many rungs in the ladder yet to be climbed. Your
children may have to take up the burden where you have left it. A
revolution may be necessary, sorrows innumerable may lie between you and
the goal of your class. And yet I bid you hope. I plead with each one
of you to remember that he is not only an individual; that he is a unit
of humanity, that he is the progenitor of unborn children, a force from
which will spring the happier and the freer generation, if not in our
time, in th