ence now, or more than that. To keep
pace with such a change is well worth a strike, since nothing but
strikes can avail. So vital is the worth of a penny; so natural is it to
kick against the nature of things, when their nature takes the form of
steady poverty amid expanding wealth. That is the simultaneous discovery
which raised the ridicule of the _Times_--that, and the further
discovery that, in Carlyle's phrase, "the Empire of old Mammon is
everywhere breaking up." The intangible walls that resisted so
obstinately are fading away. The power of wealth is suspected. Strike
after strike secures its triumphant penny, and no return of Peterloo, or
baton charges on the Liverpool St. George's Hall, driving the silent
crowd over the edge of its steep basis "as rapidly and continually as
water down a steep rock," as was seen during the strikes of August 1911,
can now check the infection of such a hope. It was an old saying of the
men who won our political liberties that the redress of grievances must
precede supply. The working people are standing now for a different
phase of liberty, but their work is their supply, and having
simultaneously discovered their grievances to be intolerable, they are
making the same old use of the ancient precept.

XII

"FIX BAYONETS!"

"Oh, que j'aime le militaire!" sighed the old French song, no doubt with
a touch of frivolity; but the sentiment moves us all. Sages have thought
the army worth preserving for a dash of scarlet and a roll of the
kettledrum; in every State procession it is the implements of death and
the men of blood that we parade; and not to nursemaids only is the
soldier irresistible. The glamour of romance hangs round him. Terrible
with knife and spike and pellet he stalks through this puddle of a
world, disdainful of drab mankind. Multitudes may toil at keeping alive,
drudging through their scanty years for no hope but living and giving
life; he shares with very few the function of inflicting death, and
moves gaily clad and light of heart. "No doubt, some civilian
occupations are very useful," said the author of an old drill-book; I
think it was Lord Wolseley, and it was a large admission for any officer
to have made. It was certainly Lord Wolseley who wrote in his _Soldier's
Pocket-Book_ that the soldier "must believe his duties are the noblest
that fall to man's lot":

"He must be taught to despise all those of civil life. Soldiers,
like missionaries, must