"If one might make a comment upon all that you have said," Maraton remarked, "I might point out to you that there is a certain selfishness in your individual suggestions. Three of you are in favour of a gigantic strike, each in his own constituency. Mr. Culvain, who is a writer and an orator, prefers the methods which appeal most to him. Yet even these strikes which you propose are puny affairs. You want to wage war for the sake of a few shillings. We ought to fight, if at all, for a greater and more splendid principle. It isn't a shilling or two more a week that the people want. It's a share—a share to which they are, without the shadow of a doubt, entitled—in the direct product of their labour."
"That's sound enough," Peter Dale admitted. "How are you going to get it?"
"You ask for too much," Weavel observed, "and you get nothing."
"It is never wise," Culvain suggested quietly, "to have the public against one."
Maraton rose a little abruptly to his feet. He had the air of one eager to dismiss the subject.
"Gentlemen," he announced, "I've heard your views. In a few days' time you shall hear mine. Only let me tell you this. To me you all seem to be working and thinking on very narrow lines. Your object seems to be the securing of small individual benefits for your individual constituents. I think that if we get to work together in this country, there must be something more national in our aspirations. That is all I have to say for the present. As I think you know, I intend to make a pronouncement of my own views at Manchester."
They all took their leave a little later. Maraton himself saw them out and watched them across the Square. Somehow or other, his depression had visibly increased as he turned away. He had come into contact lately, on the other side of the world, with a different order of person—men and women, too, passionately, strenuously in earnest. They were well-fed, prosperous individuals, these whom he had just dismissed. Their politics were their business, their position as Members of Parliament a source of unmixed joy to all of them; hard-headed men, very likely, good each in his own department; beyond that, nothing.
He returned presently to his study, where Aaron was already at work, typing letters.
"So that is your committee of Labour Members," Maraton remarked, throwing himself into an easy chair.
Aaron looked up.