close together as your country's and mine. It is
for that very reason that these periods of distrust and suspicion
continually occur, suspicions which impoverish two countries with the
millions we spend on senseless schemes of defence. Away with them all.
Stop the pendulum of your country. Declare your coal strike, your
railway strike, your ironfounders' strike. Let the revolution come. I
tell you then that we shall appear not as invaders, but as friends and
liberators. Your industries shall start again on a new basis, the basis
which you and I know of, the basis which gives to the toilers their just
and legitimate share of what they produce. Your trade shall flourish
just as it flourished before, but away to dust and powder with your
streets of pig-sties, the rat-holes into which your weary labourers
creep after their hours of senseless slavery. You and I, Maraton, know
how industries should be conducted. You and I know the just share which
Capital should claim. You and I together will make the laws. Oh, what
does it matter whether you are English or Icelanders, Fins or Turks!
Humanity is so much greater than nationality. Your men shall work side
by side with mine, and what each produces, each shall have. What is
being done for my country shall surely be done for yours. Can't you
see, Maraton--can't you see, my prophet who gropes in the darkness, that
I am showing you the only way?"

Maraton rose to his feet. He came and stood by Maxendorf's side.

"Maxendorf," he said, "you may be speaking to me from your heart. Yes,
I will admit that you are speaking to me from your heart. But you ask
me to take an awful risk. You stand first in your country to-day, but
in your country there are other powerful influences at work. So much of
what you say is true. If I believed, Maxendorf--if I believed that this
fusion, as you call it, of our people could come about in the way you
suggest, if I believed that the building up of our prosperity could
start again on the real and rational basis of many of your institutions,
if I believed this, Maxendorf, no false sentiment would stand in my way.
I would risk the eternal shame of the historians. So far as I could do
it, I would give you this country. But there is always the doubt, the
awful doubt. You have a ruler whose ideas are not your ideas. You have
a people behind you who are strange to me. I have not travelled in your
country, I know little of it. What if your people should assume t