alm which they stand for may soon become, and must before long
become, the predominant estate. They feel the rising tide already
lifting them off their feet. The elders are sobered by the flood; but
the young ones taste the salt water sprayed off the crest of the wave
and look at each other, laugh and cheer. If they rejoice they have
good reason, knowing what they know; and if I rejoice with them, I
think that I have good reason too. This time seven years ago I sang
at length of Hodge and his plow; and looking back and forth over his
blood-stained, sweat-stained and tear-stained history, I seemed to see
what was coming to him as the crown of his thousand years of toil.

I look and see the end of it,
How fair the well-lov'd land appears;
I see September's misty heat
Laid like a swooning on the corn;
I see the reaping of the wheat,
I hear afar the hunter's horn,
I see the cattle at the ford,
The panting sheep beneath the thorn!
The burden of the years is scor'd,
The reckoning made, Hodge walks alone,
Content, contenting, his own lord,
Master of what his pain has won.

And so indeed it is. The peasant now has his foot on the degrees of
the throne, and has only to step up, he and his mates of the mine, the
forge, the foundry and the railroad--to step up and lay hand to the
orb and sceptre.

If I had misgivings, and if those, when imparted to, were shared by an
old friend of mine who still gives me six hours a day of his strength
and skill when the weather and his rheumatics can hit it off together,
I may say at once that though they were renewed in me by the late
threat of the railwaymen arrogantly hurled at the only Government in
my recollection which has made arrogance in asking almost a necessary
stage in negotiation, they had been present for a long time--beyond
Mr. Smillie's wild proposals of direct action, beyond the Yorkshire
miners and the flooded coalfields; back to the day when electricians
refused to light the Albert Hall, and Merchant Seamen refused passage
to some politician or another because they didn't like his politics.
One and each of those direct and unsteady actions made me shiver for
the men with their feet on the throne's degrees. And now a Railway
Strike, which has injured every one and will throw back the railwaymen
and their Labour Party for many a year! If these things are done in
the green wood, I asked my friend, what will be done in the dry?

He couldn't answer