rect
communication with the local secretary of each town in which his
industry is represented. You see these?"

He paused and laid his hand on a little heap of telegraph forms, on
which one word was typed.

"These," he continued, "are all ready to be dispatched the second that
we hear from Mr. Stenson that is to say if we should hear unfavourably.
They are divided into batches, and each batch will be sent from a
different post-office, so that there shall be no delay. We calculate
that in seven hours, at the most, the industrial pulse of the country
will have ceased to beat."

"How long has your organisation taken to build up?" Julian enquired.

"Exactly three months," David Sands observed, turning around in his
swing chair from the desk at which he had been writing. "The scheme was
started a few days after your article in the British Review. We took
your motto as our text `Coordination and cooperation.'"

They found their way into the clubroom, and at luncheon, later on,
Julian strove to improve his acquaintance with the men who were seated
around him. Some of them were Members of Parliament with well-known
names, others were intensely local, but all seemed earnest and
clear-sighted. Phineas Cross commenced to talk about war generally. He
had just returned from a visit with other Labour Members to the
front, although it is doubtful whether the result had been exactly in
accordance with the intentions of the powers who had invited him.

"I'll tell you something about war," he said, "which contradicts most
every other experience. There's scarcely a great subject in the world
which you don't have to take as a whole, and from the biggest point of
view, to appreciate it thoroughly. It's exactly different with war. If
you want to understand more than the platitudes, you want to just take
in one section of the fighting. Say there are fifty Englishmen, decent
fellows, been dragged from their posts as commercial travellers or small
tradesmen or labourers or what-not, and they get mixed up with a similar
number of Germans. Those Germans ain't the fiends we read about. They're
not bubbling over with militarism. They don't want to lord it over all
the world. They've exactly the same tastes, the same outlook upon life
as the fifty Englishmen whom an iron hand has been forcing to do their
best to kill. Those English chaps didn't want to kill anybody, any more
than the Germans did. They had to do it, too, simply because it was p