Mr Chafe was one of these.  He was a cautious, heavy fellow, full of Burgundy and distrust.  The basis of the imperial idea inspired him with suspicion and hostility.  He could accept the American tariff on English manufactures; that was a plain position, simple damage, a blow full in the face, not to be dodged.  But the offer of better business in the English colonies in exchange for a duty on the corn and meat of foreign countries—­he could see too deep for that.  The colonials might or might not be good customers; he knew how many decanters he sold in the United States, in spite of the tariff.  He saw that the tax on food-stuffs was being commended to the working-man with the argument of higher wages.  Higher wages, with the competition of foreign labour, spelt only one word to English manufacturers, and that was ruin.  The bugbear of higher wages, immediate, threatening, near, the terror of the last thirty years, closed the prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing beyond.  He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the British manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of the operative.  Thriving workmen, doing well, and looking to do better, rose before him in terms of menace, though their prosperity might be rooted in his own.  “Give them cheap food and keep them poor,” was the sum of his advice.  His opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the unnatural:  he was one of the people whom Wallingham’s scheme in its legitimate development of a tariff on foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich.  This fact, which he constantly insisted on, did give them weight; it made him look like a cunning fellow not to be caught with chaff.  He and his business had survived free trade—­though he would not say this either—­and he preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the chances of any zollverein.  The name of the thing was enough for him, a word made in Germany, thick and mucky, like their tumblers.  As to the colonies—­Mr Chafe had been told of a certain spider who devoured her young ones.  He reversed the figure and it stood, in the imperial connection, for all the argument he wanted.

Alfred Hesketh had lived always in the hearing of such doctrine; it had stood to him for political gospel by mere force of repetition.  But he was young, with the curiosity and enterprise and impatience of dogma of youth; he belonged by temperament and situation to those plastic thousands in whom Wallingham hoped to find the leaven that should leaven the whole lump.  His own blood stirred with the desire to accomplish, to carry further; and as the scope of the philanthropist did not attract him, he was vaguely conscious of having been born too late in England.  The new political appeal of the colonies, clashing suddenly upon old insular harmonies, brought him a sense of wider fields and chances; his own case he freely translated into his country’s, and offered an open mind to politics that would help either of them.  He looked at