“I came up here because you asked me, Douglas,” he said, “but I tell you it’s no good.”
“Don’t you like my scheme of colour?” asked Murrel. “It is much admired.”
“Well,” replied the other, “I don’t know that I do particularly like your plastering romantic purple over all that old feudal tyranny and superstition; but that isn’t my difficulty. Look here, Douglas; I came here on the strict understanding that I might say what I liked; but for all that I don’t particularly want to talk against the man in his own house if I can help it. So perhaps the shortest way of putting the difficulty will be to say that the Miners’ Union here has declared a strike; and that I am the secretary of the Miners’ Union. And as I’m trying to spoil his work by staying out, I think it would be a little low down to spoil his play by coming in.”
“What are you striking about?” asked Archer.
“Well, we want more money,” replied Braintree coolly. “When two pennies will only buy one penny loaf we want two pennies to buy it with. It is called the complexity of the Industrial System. But what counts for even more with the Union is the demand for recognition.”
“Recognition of what?”
“Well, you see, the Trades Union doesn’t exist. It is a grinding tyranny, and it threatens to destroy all British trade; but it doesn’t exist. The one thing that Lord Seawood and all its most indignant critics are certain about, is that it doesn’t exist. So, by way of suggesting that there might possibly be such an entity, we reserve the right to strike.”
“And leave the whole wretched public without coal, I suppose,” cried Archer heatedly, “if you do, I fancy you’ll find public opinion is a bit too strong for you. If you won’t get the coal and the Government won’t make you, we’ll find people who will get it. I, for one, would answer for a hundred fellows from Oxford and Cambridge or the City, who wouldn’t mind working in the mine to spoil your conspiracy.”
“While you’re about it,” replied Braintree contemptuously, “you might as well get a hundred coal-miners to finish Miss Ashley’s illumination for her. Mining is a very skilled trade, my good sir. A coal-miner isn’t a coal-heaver. You might do very well as a coal-heaver.”
“I suppose you mean that as an insult,” said Archer.