ent. "I?" he replied, and she noticed
for the first time that he looked tired and worried beneath his
exuberant optimism. "I am the loneliest man on earth. The loneliest man
on earth is the one who stands between two extremes." As she made no
reply, he continued after a moment, "You think, of course, that I stand
with one extreme, not in the centre, but you are mistaken. I am in the
middle. When I try to bring the two millstones together they will grind
me to powder."

She had never heard him speak despondently before; and while she
listened to the sound of his expressive voice, so full, for the hour at
least, of discouragement, she felt drawn to him in a new and personal
way. It was as if, by showing her a side of his nature the public had
never seen, he had taken her into his confidence.

"But surely your influence is as great as ever," she said presently. A
trite remark, but the only one that occurred to her.

"I brought the crowd with me as far as I thought safe," he answered,
"and now it is beginning to turn against me because I won't lead it over
the precipice into the sea. That's the way it always is, I reckon.
That's the way it's been, anyhow, ever since Moses tried to lead the
Children of Israel out of bondage. Take these strikers, for instance. I
believe in the right to strike. I believe that they ought to have every
possible protection. I believe that their families ought to be provided
for in order to take the weapon of starvation out of the hands of the
capitalists. I'd give them as fair a field as it is in my power to
provide, and anybody would think that they would be satisfied with
simple fairness. But, no, what they are trying to do is not to strike
_for_ themselves, but to strike _at_ somebody else. They are not
satisfied with protection from starvation unless that protection
involves the right to starve somebody else. They want to tie up the
markets and stop the dairy trains, and they won't wink an eyelash if all
the babies that don't belong to them are without milk. That's war, they
tell me; and I answer that I'd treat war just as I'd treat a strike, if
I had the power. As soon as an army began to prey on the helpless, I'd
raise a bigger army if I could and throw the first one out into the
jungle where it belonged. But people don't see things like that now,
though they may in the next five hundred years. The trouble is that all
human nature, including capitalist and labourer, is tarred with the sam