"That's it, exactly," continued Crondall. "That's one difficulty which has just got to be overcome. Another is the danger that, among those who did see and feel something of it, here in London, and even in East Anglia, the habit of apathy in national matters, and the calls of business and pleasure may mean forgetting, indifference—the old fatal neglect. You see, we must remember that, crushing as the blow was, it did not actually reach so very many people. It did not force them to get up and fight for their lives. It was all over so soon. Directly they cried out, 'The Destroyers' answered with surrender, and so helped to strengthen the fatal delusion they had cherished so long, that everything is a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence."
"'They'll never go for England, because England's got the dibs,'" quoted Forbes Thompson, with a nod of assent.
"Yes, yes. 'Make alliances, and leave me to my business!' One knows it all so well. But, mind you, even to the blindest of them, the invasion has meant something."
"And the income-tax will mean something to 'em, too," said Sir Morell Strachey.
"Yes. But the English purse is deep, and the Englishman has long years of money-spinning freedom from discipline behind him. Still, here is this brutal fact of the invasion. Here we are actually condemned to nine years of life inside a circle of German encampments on English soil, with a hundred millions a year of tribute to pay for the right to live in our own England. Now my notion is that the lesson must not be lost. The teaching of the thing must be forced home. It must be burnt into these happy-go-lucky countrymen of ours—if Stairs and Reynolds are to achieve their end, or we ours."
"Our aim is to awake the sense of duty which seems to us to have become atrophied, even among the professedly religious," said Stairs.
"And ours," said Crondall, sharp as steel, "is to ram home your teaching, and to show them that the nearest duty to their hand is their duty to the State, to the Race, to their children—the duty of freeing England and throwing over German dominion."
"To render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's," said Reynolds. And Stairs nodded agreement.
"Now, by my way of it, Stairs and Reynolds must succeed before we can succeed," said Crondall. "That is my view, and because that is so, you can both look to me, up till the last breath in me, for any kind of support I can give you—for any kind of support at all. But that's not all. Where you sow, I mean to reap. We both want substantially the same harvest—mine is part of yours. I know I can count on you all. You, Stairs, and you, Reynolds, are going to carry your Message through England. I propose to follow in your wake with mine. You rouse them to the sense of duty; I show them their duty. You make them ready to do their duty; I show it them. I'll have a lecturer. I'll get pictures. They shall feel the invasion, and know what the German occupation means. You shall convert them, and I'll enlist them."
"Enlist them! By Jove! that's an idea," said Forbes Thompson. "A patriotic league, a league of defenders, a nation in arms."