“My lords, I heard a remark not intended for my ears, upon my rising, indicative of surprise that I should have anything to say upon such a subject as this.  Lest my convictions and opinions should seem to you to be those of an outsider, let me tell you this.  You are listening to one who for twelve years lived the life of this unhappy people, dwelt amongst them as a police-court missionary—­one who was driven even into some measure of insanity by the horrors he saw and tasted, and who recovered only by an ignominious flight into a far-off country.  His lordship the Bishop of Beeston has shown you very clearly how little he knows of the horrors which seethe beneath the brilliant life of this wonderful city.  He has brought it upon himself and you—­that one who does know shall tell you something of the truth of these things.”

There was an intense and breathless silence.  This was an assembly amongst whom excitement was a very rare visitant.  But there were many there now who sat still and spellbound with eyes riveted upon the speaker.  To those who were personally acquainted with him a certain change in his appearance was manifest.  A spot of colour flared in his pale cheeks.  There was a light in his eyes which no one had ever seen there before.  After years of self-repression, of a cynicism partly artificial, partly inevitable, the natural man had broken out once more, stung into life by time smooth platitudes of the great churchman against whom his attack was directed.  He was reckless of time fact that Lady Caroom, Brooks, and many of his acquaintances were in the Strangers’ Gallery.  For the motion before the House was one to obtain legal and ecclesiastical control over all independent charities appealing to the general public for support, under cover of which the Church, in the person of the Bishop of Beeston, had made a solemn and deliberate attack upon Brooks’ Society, Brooks himself, its aims and management.

As the words fell, deliberately, yet without hesitation, from his lips, vivid, scathing, forceful, there was not one there but knew that this man spoke of the things which he had felt.  The facts he marshalled before them were appalling, but not a soul doubted them.  It was truth which he hurled at them, truth before which the Bishop sat back in his seat and felt his cheeks grow paler and his eyes more full of trouble.  A great deal of it they had heard before, but never like this—­never had it been driven home into their conscience so that doubt or evasion was impossible.  And this man, who was he?  They rubbed their eyes and wondered.  Ninth Marquis of Arranmore, owner of great estates, dilettante, sportsman, cynic, latter-day sinner—­or an apostle touched with fire from Heaven to open men’s eyes, gifted for a few brief minutes with the tongue of a saintly Demosthenes.  Those who knew him gaped like children and wondered.  And all the time his words stung them like drops of burning rain.