represented.
You have a bourgeoisie which maintains itself in almost feudal luxury
by means of the labour which it employs, and that labour is content
to squeak and open its mouth for worms, when it should have the finest
fruits of the world. And all this is for want of leadership. Up you come
you David Sands, you Phineas Crosses, you Nicholas Fenns, you Thomas
Evanses. You each think that you represent Labour, but you don't. You
represent trade--the workers at one trade. How they laugh at you,
the men who like to keep the government of this country in their own
possession! They stretch down a hand to the one who has climbed the
highest, they pull him up into the Government, and after that Labour
is well quit of him. He has found his place with the gods. Perhaps they
will make him a `Sir' and his wife a `Lady,' but for him it is all over
with the Cause. And so another ten years is wasted, while another man
grows up to take his place."

"She's right enough," Furley confessed gloomily. "There is something
about the atmosphere of the inner life of politics which has proved
fatal to every Labour man who has ever climbed. Paul Fiske wrote the
same thing only a few weeks ago. He thought that it was the social
atmosphere which we still preserve around our politics. We no sooner
catch a clever man, born of the people, than we dress him up like a
mummy and put him down at dinner parties and garden parties, to do
things he's not accustomed to, and expect him to hold his own amongst
people who are not his people. There is something poisonous about it."

"Aren't you all rather assuming," Stenson suggested drily, "that the
Labour Party is the only party in politics worth considering?"

"If they knew their own strength," Catherine declared, "they would be
the predominant party. Should you like to go to the polls to-day and
fight for your seats against them?"

"Heaven forbid!" Mr. Stenson exclaimed. "But then we've made up our
mind to one thing--no general election during the war. Afterwards,
I shouldn't be at all surprised if Unionists and Liberals and even
Radicals didn't amalgamate and make one party."

"To fight Labour," Furley said grimly.

"To keep England great," Mr. Stenson replied. "You must remember that so
far as any scheme or program which the Labour Party has yet disclosed,
in this country or any other, they are preeminently selfish. England has
mighty interests across the seas. A parish-council form of government