He formed his Board—­without figure-heads, wholly of workers.  There was scarcely a name which any one had ever heard of before.  He had his interview with the bishop, who was shocked at his views, and publicly pronounced his enterprise harmful and pauperizing, and Verity, with the names of the Board as a new weapon, came for him more vehemently than ever.  Brooks, at last goaded into action, sent the paper to his solicitors and went down to Medchester to attend a dinner given to Mr. Bullsom.

It was at Medchester that he recovered his spirits.  He knew the place so well that it was easy for him to gauge and appreciate the altered state of affairs there.  The centre of the town was swept clean at last of those throngs of weary-faced men and youths looking for a job, the factories were running full time-there seemed to his fancy to be even an added briskness in the faces and the footsteps of the hurrying crowds of people.  Later on at the public dinner which he had come down to attend, he was amply assured as to the sudden wave of prosperity which was passing over the whole country.  Mr. Bullsom, with an immense expanse of white shirt, a white waistcoat and a scarlet camellia in his button-hole, beamed and oozed amiability upon every one.  Brooks he grasped by both hands with a full return to his old cordiality, indulgence in which he had rather avoided since he had been aware of the social gulf between them.

“Brooks,” he said, “I owe this to you.  It was your suggestion.  And I don’t think it’s turned out so badly, eh?  What do you think?”

“I think that you have found your proper sphere,” Brooks answered, smiling.  “I can’t think why you ever needed me to suggest it to you.”

“My boy, I can’t either,” Mr. Bullsom declared.  “This is one of the proudest nights of my life.  Do you know what we’ve done up there at Westminster, eh?  We’ve given this old country a new lease of life.  How they were all laughing at us up their sleeve, eh!  Germans, and Frenchmen, and Yankees.  It’s a horse of another colour now.  John Bull has found out how to protect himself.  And, Brooks, my boy, it’s been mentioned to-night, and I’m a proud man when I think of it.  There were others who did the showy part of the work, of course, the speechmaking and the bill-framing and all that, but I was the first man to set the Protection snowball rolling.  It wasn’t much I had to say, but I said it.  A glass of wine with you, Sir Henry?  With pleasure, sir!

“I wonder how long it will last,” Brooks’ neighbour remarked, cynically.  “The manufacturers are like a lot of children with a new toy.  What about the Colonies?  What are they going to say about it?”

“We have no Colonies,” Brooks answered, smiling.  “You are only half an Imperialist.  Don’t you know that they have been incorporated in the British Empire?

“Hope they’ll like it,” his neighbour remarked, sardonically.  “Plenty of glory and a good price to pay for it.  What licks me is that every one seems to imagine that this Tariff Bill is going to give the working-classes a leg-up.  To my mind it’s the capitalist who’s going to score by it.”