a nod of assent.

"Yes, yes. 'Make alliances, and leave me to my business!' One knows it
all so well. But, mind you, even to the blindest of them, the invasion
has meant something."

"And the income-tax will mean something to 'em, too," said Sir Morell
Strachey.

"Yes. But the English purse is deep, and the Englishman has long years
of money-spinning freedom from discipline behind him. Still, here is
this brutal fact of the invasion. Here we are actually condemned to nine
years of life inside a circle of German encampments on English soil,
with a hundred millions a year of tribute to pay for the right to live
in our own England. Now my notion is that the lesson must not be lost.
The teaching of the thing must be forced home. It must be burnt into
these happy-go-lucky countrymen of ours--if Stairs and Reynolds are to
achieve their end, or we ours."

"Our aim is to awake the sense of duty which seems to us to have become
atrophied, even among the professedly religious," said Stairs.

"And ours," said Crondall, sharp as steel, "is to ram home your
teaching, and to show them that the nearest duty to their hand is their
duty to the State, to the Race, to their children--the duty of freeing
England and throwing over German dominion."

"To render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's," said Reynolds. And
Stairs nodded agreement.

"Now, by my way of it, Stairs and Reynolds must succeed before we can
succeed," said Crondall. "That is my view, and because that is so, you
can both look to me, up till the last breath in me, for any kind of
support I can give you--for any kind of support at all. But that's not
all. Where you sow, I mean to reap. We both want substantially the same
harvest--mine is part of yours. I know I can count on you all. You,
Stairs, and you, Reynolds, are going to carry your Message through
England. I propose to follow in your wake with mine. You rouse them to
the sense of duty; I show them their duty. You make them ready to do
their duty; I show it them. I'll have a lecturer. I'll get pictures.
They shall _feel_ the invasion, and know what the German occupation
means. You shall convert them, and I'll enlist them."

"Enlist them! By Jove! that's an idea," said Forbes Thompson. "A
patriotic league, a league of defenders, a nation in arms."

"The Liberators!"

"Ah! Yes, the Liberators."

"Or the Patriots, simply?"

"I would enrol them just as citizens," said Crondall. "By that time
they shoul