I asked if he spoke for the bulk of the men.

’For ninety per cent in ony ballot.  I don’t say that there’s not plenty of riff-raff—­the pint-and-a-dram gentry and the soft-heads that are aye reading bits of newspapers, and muddlin’ their wits with foreign whigmaleeries.  But the average man on the Clyde, like the average man in ither places, hates just three things, and that’s the Germans, the profiteers, as they call them, and the Irish.  But he hates the Germans first.’

‘The Irish!’ I exclaimed in astonishment.

‘Ay, the Irish,’ cried the last of the old Border radicals.  ’Glasgow’s stinkin’ nowadays with two things, money and Irish.  I mind the day when I followed Mr Gladstone’s Home Rule policy, and used to threep about the noble, generous, warm-hearted sister nation held in a foreign bondage.  My Goad!  I’m not speakin’ about Ulster, which is a dour, ill-natured den, but our own folk all the same.  But the men that will not do a hand’s turn to help the war and take the chance of our necessities to set up a bawbee rebellion are hateful to Goad and man.  We treated them like pet lambs and that’s the thanks we get.  They’re coming over here in thousands to tak the jobs of the lads that are doing their duty.  I was speakin’ last week to a widow woman that keeps a wee dairy down the Dalmarnock Road.  She has two sons, and both in the airmy, one in the Cameronians and one a prisoner in Germany.  She was telling me that she could not keep goin’ any more, lacking the help of the boys, though she had worked her fingers to the bone.  “Surely it’s a crool job, Mr Amos,” she says, “that the Goavernment should tak baith my laddies, and I’ll maybe never see them again, and let the Irish gang free and tak the bread frae our mouth.  At the gasworks across the road they took on a hundred Irish last week, and every yin o’ them as young and well set up as you would ask to see.  And my wee Davie, him that’s in Germany, had aye a weak chest, and Jimmy was troubled wi’ a bowel complaint.  That’s surely no justice!”. . . .’

He broke off and lit a match by drawing it across the seat of his trousers.  ’It’s time I got the gas lichtit.  There’s some men coming here at half-ten.’

As the gas squealed and flickered in the lighting, he sketched for me the coming guests.  ‘There’s Macnab and Niven, two o’ my colleagues.  And there’s Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters, and a lad Wilkie—­he’s got consumption, and writes wee bits in the papers.  And there’s a queer chap o’ the name o’ Tombs—­they tell me he comes frae Cambridge, and is a kind of a professor there—­anyway he’s more stuffed wi’ havers than an egg wi’ meat.  He telled me he was here to get at the heart o’ the workingman, and I said to him that he would hae to look a bit further than the sleeve o’ the workin’-man’s jaicket.  There’s no muckle in his head, poor soul.  Then there’ll be Tam Norie, him that edits our weekly paper—­Justice for All.  Tam’s a humorist and great