"Don't you be too sure of that, comrade," warned Mr Bilch. "Why, it's not twelve o'clock yet by a long way. There'll be half a dozen editions out before the 'Three o'clock winners.'" Mr Bilch evidently regarded his shaft that each fresh edition might contain a new country imposing a tax humorously, but several comrades looked towards the Home Secretary enquiringly.
"The other large importers are Italy, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, Spain and Denmark," said Mr Tubes, who could have talked coal statistics for hours if necessary. "All these, with the possible exception of Russia, must import. It is unlikely that the estimate I have given will be exceeded from that cause."
"And the result?"
"Above and below, about a million men are now employed in raising 236,000,000 tons. It is simple arithmetic.... In less than a month about two hundred thousand more men will be out of work."
Mr Chadwing, Chancellor of the Exchequer, moved uneasily in his chair.
"That is the full extent?" enquired Cecil Brown.
"No," admitted the Home Secretary. "That is the inevitable direct result. Forty-five million tons less will be carried by rail, or cart, or ship, or all three. A fair sprinkling of railway-men, carters, dockers, stokers, sailors, and other fellows will be dropped off too. There will be fewer railway trucks built this next year, less doing in the fire-grate trade, several thousand horses not wanted, a slight falling off in road-mending work. There is not a trade in England, from steeple-building to hop-picking, that will not be a little worse off because of those 45,000,000 tons. Then the two hundred thousand out-of-work miners will burn less coal at home, the ships and the engines will burn less, and the workshops and the smithies will burn less, and the whole process will be repeated again and again, for coal is like a snowball in its cumulative effects, and it cannot stand still."
If Mr Tubes had come to compromise, he had remained to publish broadcast.
Perhaps no one quite understood the danger yet, for the mind, used to everyday effects, does not readily grasp the extent of a calamity, and six hours before there had not been a cloud even the size of a man's hand on their horizon. The Premier thought it was impolitic on his colleague's part; the Treasury officials looked on it as a move to force their hands; the Foreign Under-Secretary was suspicious that Mr Tubes was leading away by some mysterious by-path from the unpreparedness of his own Department to Foreign Office remissness. They all continued to look silently at the Home Secretary as he continued to stand.
"The indirect effects will involve about two million people to some extent," he summed up.