“Come!” thought the Vicar, “this fellow is talking sense after all, and talking it rather well.”  Mr Rounsell stood up and pointed out the positions of Liege and Polpier on the wall-map, and their relative distances from London.  A moment later the Vicar frowned again as Mr Boult launched into a violent—­and as it turned out, a lengthy—­invective against the German Emperor; with the foulness of whose character and designs he had, it seemed, been intimately acquainted for a number of years.  “Who made the War?” “Who had been planning it and spying for the opportunity to gratify his unbridled lust of power?” “Who would stand arraigned for it before the awful tribunal of God?” &c.  The answer was “the Kaiser,” “the Kaiser,” “the Kaiser Wilhelm”—­Mr Boult pronounced the name in German and threw scorn into it.

—­“Which,” mused the Vicar, “is an argument ad invidiam; and, when one comes to think of it, rather a funny one.  The man is still talking sense, though:  only I wish he’d talk it differently.”

Then for a quarter of an hour Mr Boult traced the genesis of the War, with some ability but in special-pleader style and without a particle of fairness.  He went on to say that he, personally, was not in favour of Conscription. [As a matter of fact he had spoken both for and against Compulsory Service on many public platforms.] He believed in the Voluntary Principle:  and looking on the many young men gathered in the body of the hall, and more particularly at the back ["excellent material” he called them, too], he felt convinced there would be no hanging back that night; but to-morrow, or, rather, Monday, when he returned to London he would be able to report that the heart of Polpier was sound and fired with a resolve to serve our common country.  Mr Boult proceeded to make the Vicar writhe in his seat by a jocular appeal to “the young ladies in the audience” not to walk-out with any young man until he had clothed himself in khaki.  He wound up with one of his most effective perorations, boldly enlisting John Bright and the Angel of Death; and sat down amid tumultous applause.  It takes all sorts to make a world, and this kind of speech.

Farmer Best called upon the Vicar.

“I wish,” said Mr Steele, “to add just a word or two to emphasise one particular point in Mr Boult’s speech; or, rather, to put it in a somewhat different light.  And I shall be brief, lest I spoil the general effect on your minds of his very powerful appeal.

“I address myself to the women in this room. . . .  With you the last word lies, as it rightly should.  It is to you that husband, son, brother, wooer, will turn for the deciding voice to say, ‘Go, help to save England—­and may God prosper and guard you’; because it is your heart that makes the sacrifice, as it is your image the man will carry away with him; because the England he goes to defend shapes itself in his mind as ‘home,’ as the one most sacred spot, though it be but a cottage, in which his imagination or his memory installs you as queen; in which your presence reigns, or is to reign.