Another of the directors stood up.
"Has our new managing director any other harmless little proposals to make?" he asked, in bitter sarcasm.
"Yes," replied Captain Hathaway, "I propose to take powers to create a new Deferred Stock which will rank for dividend after the Ordinary Stock has received eight per cent, but which will in all circumstances carry a right to vote on the board—and this stock will be vested in the representatives of our employees, chosen by them."
"It will never be agreed to by the men!" cried a voice.
"It is agreed to already by the men's representatives," replied the new chief, feeling the coolness of courage return to him as once when he had faced the mob of Germans.
The wealthiest of the directors, a man associated with other houses in the trade, rose in his turn.
"I warn you, Hathaway, that I shall dispose of my interests in this business—and I'm going to fight you to the last shilling! You'll be broke in a year!" "All of us! All of us!" came a chorus of approval. "We'll all fight! This is sheer madness!"
"Fight, if you will, gentlemen," said Hathaway calmly. "It won't pay you. I haven't been idle these three months. I may tell you that I have contracts in my pocket that will keep us going for many months to come—more than a year. The whole world is shrieking for goods, and Germany is supplying them—capturing your markets while you commit suicide in trying to get the better of Labour. In these last months I have established agents all over the world—and I've got the orders! I know what the other houses have got—I know what's open to you—you can't fight us!—but you'll be taken over by the Government if your obstinacy continues this unworthy industrial strife."
There was a silence of vague-headed, angry old men who did not quite know what to say.
"And now, gentlemen," continued Hathaway. "Let me plead for a better spirit. That great mass of human beings you coldly call Labour fought for England just as I fought for England, just as thousands and thousands of our own class fought. We've been together in the trenches year in year out and we've learnt to know each other, not as hostile abstractions, but as living men,—good men, the most of us. We learnt all sorts of things we didn't realize before the war, but most of all we learnt—and when I say we, I mean your sons as well—that we're all Englishmen and that we all have to play the game and stick together—officer and man. D'you think I who have watched over the comfort of my men, taught them, led them into danger and seen them unafraid, who have hungered with them, thirsted with them, gloried in them for these last long years—d'you think I can coldly condemn those men and their wives and children to starvation now? D'you think I can treat them as an enemy? I can't. And the men who have been proud of us, their officers,—d'you think they haven't learnt the value of leadership? They have—but not the leadership of a slave-master. In the long bitter years of strife those men have won for themselves a freedom of soul which is the life-force of a free Empire! Class-hatred! It has vanished as between officer and man. We're all Englishmen together—and we're going to work, share and share alike, in the new England, that, share and share alike, we fought for!" He flung open the door behind him. "Here, gentlemen, is Jim Swain, the leader of your work-people in their time of trouble. He saved my life twice—once in the trenches and got a D.C.M. when he ought to have had the V.C.—and again to-day when he set a seal of comradeship between the managing director and the employees of Hathaway's. Together, he and I, and those we represent, are going to make our patch of England worth the lives that were spent to save it!"