“Ah, well,” said Wharton, “we won’t have names; that’ll do us no good.  It’s not the men you’ve got to go for so much—­though we shall go for them too before long when we’ve got the law more on our side.  It’s the system.  It’s the whole way of dividing the wealth that you made, you and your children—­by your work, your hard, slavish, incessant work—­between you and those who don’t work, who live on your labour and grow fat on your poverty!  What we want is a fair division.  There ought to be wealth enough—­there is wealth enough for all in this blessed country.  The earth gives it; the sun gives it:  labour extracts and piles it up.  Why should one class take three-fourths of it and leave you and your fellow-workers in the cities the miserable pittance which is all you have to starve and breed on?  Why?—­why?  I say.  Why!—­because you are a set of dull, jealous, poor-spirited cowards, unable to pull together, to trust each other, to give up so much as a pot of beer a week for the sake of your children and your liberties and your class—­there, that’s why it is, and I tell it you straight out!”

He drew himself up, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at them—­scorn and denunciation in every line of his young frame, and the blaze of his blue eye.  A murmur ran through the room.  Some of the men laughed excitedly.  Darwin sprang up again.

“You keep the perlice off us, an’ gie us the cuttin’ up o’ their bloomin’ parks an’ we’ll do it fast enough,” he cried.

“Much good that’ll do you, just at present,” said Wharton, contemptuously.  “Now, you just listen to me.”

And, leaning forward over the desk again, his finger pointed at the room, he went through the regular Socialist programme as it affects the country districts—­the transference of authority within the villages from the few to the many, the landlords taxed more and more heavily during the transition time for the provision of house room, water, light, education and amusement for the labourer; and ultimately land and capital at the free disposal of the State, to be supplied to the worker on demand at the most moderate terms, while the annexed rent and interest of the capitalist class relieves him of taxes, and the disappearance of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master in his own house, the slave of no man, the equal of all.  And, as a first step to this new Jerusalem—­organisation!—­self-sacrifice enough to form and maintain a union, to vote for Radical and Socialist candidates in the teeth of the people who have coals and blankets to give away.