Mr Bilch secured it, and turning to the space which is left blank for the inclusion of news received up to the very moment of going to press, he read aloud the single item it contained.
COAL WAR
Berlin, Thursday Morning.
"The action which France is reported to have taken had for some time been anticipated here. On all sides there is the opinion, amounting to conviction, that Germany must at once call into operation the power lying dormant in the Penalising Tariff and impose a tax on imported coal. It is agreed that otherwise, in her frantic endeavours to restore the balance of her export trade, England would flood this country with cheap coal and precipitate a state of things similar to that from which France is just emerging.
"Emphasis is laid on the fact that such a measure will be self-protective and in no way aggressive. It is not anticipated that the tax will exceed 2 mks. 50 pf., or at the most 3 mks. per ton."
"Export value, eight and elevenpence," murmured a late arrival, one of the fifty practical men in the House. "Yes, I imagine that two marks fifty will just about knock the bottom out."
"Is there nothing we can offer them in exchange?" demanded some one. "Nothing we can hit them back with?"
Cecil Brown, who was suspected of heterodoxy on this one point, crystallised the tariff question into three words.
"Nothing but tears," he replied.
"If there's one thing that fairly makes me hot it's the way we always have to wait for some one else to tell us what's going on," said the comrade who had brought in the Pall Mall Gazette, looking across at the Foreign Office Under-Secretary resentfully. "A fellow in Holborn here pokes the paper under my nose and asks me what we're going to do about it, and there I don't even know what is being done at us. What I want to know is, what our ambassadors and Foreign Office think they're there for. It's always the same, and then there'll be the questions in Parliament, and we know nothing. Makes us look like a set of kiddin' amateurs."
The fact had been noticed. Former governments had not infrequently earned the title in one or two departments. Later governments had qualified for it in every department. The reason lay on the surface; the members of those parliaments and the men who sent them were themselves bunglers and amateurs in their daily work and life. Except in the stereotyped product of machinery, accuracy was scarcely known. The man who had built a house in England at that period, the man who had had a rabbit-hutch built to order, the man who had stipulated for one article to be made exactly like a copy, the man who had been so unfortunate as to require "the plumbers in," the man who had to do with labour in any shape or form, the man who had been "faithfully" promised delivery or completion by a certain stated time, the woman who shopped, the person who merely existed with open eyes, could all testify out of experiences, some heartrending, some annoying, some simply amusing, that precision and reliability scarcely existed among the lower grades of industry and commerce. It was a period of transition. The worker had cast off the love, the delicacy, the intelligence of the craftsman, and he had not yet attained to the unvarying skill of the automaton. In another century one man would only be able to fix throttle valve connections on to hot-water pipes, but his fixing of throttle valves would be a thing to dream about, while the initial letter A's of his brother, whose whole life would be devoted to engraving initial letter A's on brass dog-collar plates, would be as near unswerving perfection as mundane initials ever could be.
"Makes us look like a set of tinkerin' amateurs."