command was that we were to travel night and day,
so urgent was the necessity.

'What happened? The boat by which I came was held up in the harbour
for twenty-four hours. Why? I am not talking without my book,--I
know, I have made investigations, and I will tell you why. The firemen
were in public-houses, and would not come away. And the Government
allowed those public-houses to be open; the Government allowed those
firemen to drink until they were in an unfit condition to take us
across. The Government allowed the stuff that robbed them of their
manhood, and of their sense of responsibility, to be manufactured. The
Government allowed private individuals to make fortunes out of that
stuff! Just think of it! There we were, all waiting, but we could not
go. Why could not we go? Why were we held up, when the lives of
thousands of others depended upon us? when the success of the war
probably depended upon it? Drink! there is your answer in one word.

'Here's this affair of the last two or three days; it didn't come off.
Ammunition was wasted, men's lives were wasted, hearts were broken; but
it didn't come off. Why was it?

'What are we fighting? We are fighting devilry, inhumanity, Prussian
barbarism. Search your dictionary, and you can't find names too bad to
describe what we are fighting. But in order to do it, we use one of
the devil's chief weapons, which is robbing us of victory.

There was a strange intensity in his voice, and I think he forgot all
about himself in what he said.

'Look here,' he went on, 'you remember how some time ago we were crying
out for munitions. "Let us have more guns, more munitions," we said.
The Germans, who had been preparing for war for so many years, had
mountains of it, and as some one has said, thousands of our men were
blown into bloody rags each day. And we could not answer back. We had
neither guns nor shells. Why?'

'Because we were not properly organized. You see----'

'Yes, it was partly that, but more because our power was wasted, in the
gun factories and the munition factories. You know as well as I do
that it was on the continual and persistent work of the people in those
factories that our supplies depended. What happened? Hundreds,
thousands of them left work at noon on Saturdays, and then started
drinking, and did not appear at their work until the Tuesday or
Wednesday following, and when they came they were inefficient, muddled.
Work that re