employers, by Act of Parliament, to agree to a vital principle upon which the men insisted.  The night I drove home from the House I said to Lady Elisabeth, my niece, that that measure, small though it was, marked a new era in the social conditions of the country.  It did.  What I have commenced, I am prepared to go on with.  I am prepared by every logical and honest means to legislate for labour.  I am prepared to legislate in such a way that the prosperity of the manufacturer, all the manufacturers in this country, must be shared by the workpeople.  I am prepared to fight, tooth and nail, against twenty per cent dividends on capital and twenty-five shillings a week wages for the operative.  There are others in the Cabinet of my point of view.  In a couple of years we must go to the country.  I am going to the country to ask for a people’s government.  Go to Manchester, if you must, but talk common sense to the people.  Let them strike where they are subject to wrongs, and I promise you that I am on their side, and every pressure that my Government can bring to bear upon the employers, shall be used in their favour.  You shall win—­you as the champion of the men, shall win all along the line.  You shall improve the conditions of every one of those industries in the north.  But—­it must be done legitimately and without sinister complications.  I know what is in your mind, Mr. Maraton, quite well.  I know your proposal.  It is in your mind to have the railway strike, the coal strike, the ironfounders’ strike, and the strike of the Lancashire operatives, all take place on the same day.  You intend to lay the country pulseless and motionless.  You won’t accept terms.  You court disaster—­disaster which you refer to as an operation.  Don’t do it.  Try my way.  I offer you certain success.  I offer you my alliance, a seat in Parliament at once, a place in my Government in two years’ time.  What more can you ask for?  What more can you do for the people than fight for them side by side with me?”

Maraton had moved a little nearer to the window.  He was looking out into the night.  Very faintly now in the distant woods he could still catch the song of the nightingale.  Almost he fancied in the shadows that he could catch sight of Julia’s strained face leaning towards him, the face of the prophetess, warning him against the easy ways, calling to him to remember.  His principles had been to him a part of his life.  What if he should be wrong?  What if he should bring misery and suffering upon millions upon millions, for the sake of a generation which might never be born?  There was something practical about Mr. Foley’s offer, an offer which could have been made only by a great man.  His brain moved swiftly.  As he stood there, he seemed to look out upon a vast plain of misery, a country of silent furnaces, of smokeless chimneys, a country drooping and lifeless, dotted with the figures of dying men and women.  What an offering!  What a sacrifice?  Would the people still believe in him when the blow fell?  Could he himself pass out of life with the memory of it all in his mind, and feel that his life’s work had been good?  He remained speechless.