Among the working men of the country—the class that the League had come into being to control—it had passed into the category of a second Buttercup League and was ignored. A few, better informed, accepted the conclusions that Mr Hammet and his associates had arrived at, and laughed quietly in their sleeves at the thought of the coming humiliation of the confiding members. Last of all there remained a scattered few here and there, who, through natural suspicion or a shrewder wisdom than their fellows, had of late begun to detect in the existence of the League a real menace to themselves, and to urge the powers, and Mr Tubes in particular, to counteract its aims. It might have been a race, a desperate race, but for one simple thing. Hampden had asked for three years in which to complete his plans, and both friends and foes, deducing from every experience of the past, ranging from the opening of an exhibition to the closing of a war, had conceded that this meant four at least. But Hampden and the man who had been a sailor had no intention of being embarrassed by a race. Not three years meaning four, but three years meaning two, had underlain the boast, and at the end of two years, although there was still much to be gained by time and an unfettered choice of the moment of attack, there was no probability of being forestalled on any important point.
Such was the position when Salt set out on his provincial holiday.
He had nothing to learn; elementary detail of that kind belonged to another journey, when, more than two years ago, he had made the self-same tour. He did not go to offer peace or war; that die had been cast blindly—who shall say how many years before?—in Northampton boot factories, Lancashire mills, Durham coal-pits, in Radical clubs and Labour cabinets. But in war, and in civil war most of all, every blow aimed at the foe must spend its expiring force upon a friend—and therefore Salt went to the coal-fields.
At each centre he was met by a high official of the League who had local knowledge. The man made his report; it concerned a list he brought, a list of names. Sometimes it contained only three or four names, sometimes as many dozens. If to each name there stood the word "Content," Salt passed on to his next centre. If some were reported to be holding out or dissatisfied, Salt remained. When he resumed his methodical way the word "Content" had been added to every name.
Only once did failure threaten to mar his record. A Lancashire colliery proprietor, a man who had risen from the lowest grade of labour, as men more often did in the hard, healthy days of emulous rivalry than in the later piping times of union-imposed collective indolence, did not wish to listen. Positive, narrow, over-bearing, he was permeated with the dogmatic egotism of his successful life. He had never asked another man's advice; he had never made a mistake. As hard as the ground out of which he had carved his fortune, he hated and despised his men; they knew it, and hated and respected him in return. His own brother worked as a miner in his "1500 deep" and received a miner's wage. He hated his master with the rest. Lomas was the "closest" employer in the north central coal-field, and the richest. But there were fewer widows and orphans in Halghcroft than in any other pit village of its size, and Lomas spent nothing in insurance. Under his immediate eye cage cables did not snap, tram shackles part, nor did unexpected falls of shoring occur. His men did not smoke at their work, and no mysterious explosion had ever engaged the attention of a Board of Trade enquiry.
Salt found him sitting in his shirt sleeves in a noble room, furnished in the taste and profusion of a crowded pantechnicon with the most costly specimens of seventeen periods of decorative art. He received him with his usual manner, and that was the manner of a bellicose curmudgeon towards an unwelcome deputation of suppliants. For emphasis, between the frank didactic aphorisms which formed his arguments and his rules of life, he banged with his fist a lapis lazuli table, and lowered his voice in a confidential aside to inform his visitor that three thousand pounds was the figure that the little piece of furniture had cost him, and that in matters of taste he stuck at nothing—an unnecessary piece of information after one had cast an astonished glance around that bizarre room.
In Lomas's future there loomed a knighthood—the consummation in his mind of all earthly ambition and the possible fruit of a lavish charity of the kind that is scarcely the greatest of the three, and his policy was wholly dictated by a fear of endangering his chances. He would have resented the suggestion, in the face of several munificent donations that he had recently made to certain funds, and a gracious acknowledgment which he had received, that the King was not following his career with a personal interest. What, then, was the King's attitude towards the Unity League and its plan of campaign? Had Salt anything to show? It was useless to protest the inviolability of royal neutrality; Lomas only banged the lapis lazuli. That was good enough for outsiders, he retorted: now, between themselves? The strong man who was restrained by diplomatic conventions could make no headway with the strong man who was frankly primitive in his selfishness, and Salt withdrew, baffled, but unperturbed. But the sequel was that before he left his hotel the following day Lomas had waited upon him with full acquiescence to the terms, and the central coal-field was "Content."
The inference might be that at last the intentions of the League must have been disclosed. The reality was nothing of the kind. What had been revealed to these men, then—the largest employers of labour of any class throughout the country—to which they had signified their consent? it may be asked. And the truth was that nothing had been revealed; that even the officers of the League who sounded them were in the dark. In the past, industrial struggles had always been between capital and labour. That vaster encounter, upon which the League was now concentrating its energies, was not to be on such clearly defined lines, and in the strife capital might suffer side by side with labour. Against that contingency the coal influence had now been indemnified in the name of the Unity League and the future Government, and the guarantee had been accepted. It was a far-reaching precaution in the end; it narrowed the issue, and it secured more than neutrality in a quarter where open hostility might have otherwise been proclaimed. It just tended to realise that perfection of detail and completeness of preparation that mark the successful campaign.
But if there was nothing more to learn in the sense that the data upon which the League had based its plans had long since been complete, it was impossible for a thoughtful observer to pass through the land without learning much. Even two years of increasing privilege had left a deeper mark. A lavish policy of "Bread and Circuses" was again depleting the countryside, choking the towns, and destroying the instinct of citizenship, just as it had speeded the decline of another world-power two thousand years before. While wages had remained practically stationary, the leisure of the working man had been appreciably increased, and it was now being discovered that the working man had no way of passing his leisure except in spending money. Betting and drunkenness had increased in direct ratio to the lengthened hours of enforced idleness, and other disquieting indications of how the time was being spent, were brought home to those who moved among the poor. Where the money came from, the books of the great thrift societies at once revealed. There was no longer any necessity for the working man to save; his wages were guaranteed, his risks of sickness and every other adversity were insured against, his old age was pensioned, his children were, if necessary, State-adopted.
Even the Trades Unions had abolished their subscriptions and dissipated their reserves. There was no need of thrift now, for the Government was the working man's savings bank, and had cut out the debit pages of his pass-book. It was almost the Millennium. The only drawback was that, with all this affluence around, the working man found himself very much in the condition of a financial Ancient Mariner. There was a great deal of money being spent on him, and for him, and by him, but he never had any in his pocket. And the working man's wife was even worse off.