People were given a few inches.

I read in the papers that same day a quite long account of a discussion of nine bishops for five hours (meeting at the same time) on a matter of proper clothes for clergymen.

I would have said of that meeting of the Labour Copartnership Association—­that it was a meeting of a Society for Defence and Protection of Longer Possible Religion on the Earth—­but the clergy out of all the invitations, did not seem very largely to have had time to be there.

I wondered too a little about the papers, as I hunted through them.

It set one to thinking if anything serious to the nation would have happened, if possibly during the coal strike the London papers had devoted as much attention to T.C.  Taylor—­a mutual interest employer—­and to how he runs his business—­as to Horatio Bottomley?

Possibly too what Mr. Sandow prefers to have people drink is not so important—­perhaps whole pages of it at a time—­as Amos Mann and how he runs his shoe business without strikes, or as Joseph Bibby and how he makes oil cakes and loyal workmen together.

I read the other day of a clergyman in New Jersey—­who was organizing a league of all the left-handed men in the world.  Everything is being organized, whether or no.  Some one has financed him.  There will be some one very soon now who will pay the bill for organizing the attention of a world and for deciding the fate of human nature.  It would be worth while spending possibly one fortune on getting human nature to settle decisively and once for all whether it has any reason to believe in itself or not.  Why have a world at all—­one like this?  Do we want it?  Who wants it?  What do we want instead?  We will advertise and find out.  We will spend millions of pounds and Dreadnoughts, even national beer-bills on it, if necessary, on making everybody know that mentally competent business men—­mutual-interest employers, and mentally competent workmen—­mutual-interest workmen, can be produced by the human race.  When everybody knows that this is true, nine out of ten Parliamentary questions would be settled, the Churches would again have a chance to be noticed, and education and even religion could be taken seriously.  There would be some object in being a teacher perhaps once more and in making teaching again a great profession.  There would be some object perhaps in even being an artist.  The world would start off on a decent, self-respecting theory or vision about itself.  Things could begin to be done in society once more, soundly, permanently, humanly and from the bottom up.

We would go out on the streets again—­rich and poor—­and look in each other’s faces.  We would take up our morning papers without a sinking at the heart.

And the men who have stopped believing in men and who merely believe in machines would be indicted before the bar of mankind.  We would see them slowly filing back, one by one, to where they belong—­on the back seats of the world.