Now the crowd, with him and Miss Levering as sole exceptions, were dissolved again in laughter. What had that girl been saying?
'Yes, we're spectres at the Liberal feast; and we're becoming inconveniently numerous. We've got friends everywhere. Up and down the country we go organizing——'
'’Ow do you go—in a pram?' At which the crowd rocked with delight.
The only person who hadn't heard the sally, you would say, was the orator. On she went—
'Organizing branches and carrying forward the work of propaganda. You people in London stroll about with your hands in your pockets and your hats on the back of your heads, and with never a notion of what's going on in the world that thinks and works. That's the world that's making the future. Some of you understand it so little you think all that we tell you is a joke—just as the governing class used to laugh at the idea of a Labour Party in conservative England. While those people were laughing, the Labour men were at work. They talked and wrote; they lectured, and printed, and distributed, and organized, and one fine day there was a General Election! To everybody's astonishment, thirty Labour men were returned to Parliament! Just that same sort of thing is going on now among women. We have our people at work everywhere. And let me tell you, the most wonderful part of it all is to discover how little teaching we have to do. How ready the women are, all over the three kingdoms.'
'Rot!'
'The women are against it.'
'Read the letters in the papers.'
'Why don't more women come to hear you if they're so in favour?'
'The converted don't need to come. It's you who need to come!' Above roars of derision: 'You felt that or, of course, you wouldn't be here. Men are so reasonable! As to the women who write letters to the papers to say they're against the Suffrage, they are very ignorant, those ladies, or else it may be they write their foolish letters to please their menfolk. Some of them, I know, think the end and aim of woman is to please. I don't blame them; it's the penalty of belonging to the parasite class. But those women are a poor little handful. They write letters to prove that they "don't count," and they prove it.' She waved them away with one slim hand. 'That's one reason we don't bother much with holding drawing-room meetings. The older Suffragists have been holding drawing-room meetings for forty years!' She brought it out to shouts. 'But we go to the mill gates! That's where we hold our meetings! We hold them at the pit-brow; we hold them everywhere that men and women are working and suffering and hoping for a better time.'