‘Let him speak! ‘Ear him! Hoy! Hoy!’
The chairman interposes, but by the time that order is restored the Conservative working man has thrust his hat upon his head and is off to the nearest public-house, muttering oaths.
Mr. Cullen rises, at the same time rises Mr. Cowes. These two gentlemen are fated to rise simultaneously. They scowl at each other. Mr. Cullen begins to speak, and Mr. Cowes, after a circular glance of protest, resumes his seat. The echoes tell that we are in for oratory with a vengeance. Mr. Cullen is a short, stout man, very seedily habited, with a great rough head of hair, an aquiline nose, lungs of vast power. His vein is King Cambyses’; he tears passion to tatters; he roars leonine; he is your man to have at the pamper’d jades of Asia! He has got hold of a new word, and that the verb to ‘exploit.’ I am exploited, thou art exploited,—he exploits! Who? Why, such men as that English duke whom the lecturer gripped and flagellated. The English duke is Mr. Cullen’s bugbear; never a speech from Mr. Cullen but that duke is most horribly mauled. His ground rents,—yah! Another word of which Mr. Cullen is fond is ‘strattum,’—usually spelt and pronounced with but one t midway. You and I have the misfortune to belong to a social ‘strattum’ which is trampled flat and hard beneath the feet of the landowners. Mr. Cullen rises to such a point of fury that one dreads the consequences—to himself. Already the chairman is on his feet, intimating in dumb show that the allowed ten minutes have elapsed; there is no making the orator hear. At length his friend who sits by him fairly grips his coat-tails and brings him to a sitting posture, amid mirthful tumult. Mr. Cullen joins in the mirth, looks as though he had never been angry in his life. And till next Sunday comes round he will neither speak nor think of the social question.
Mr. Cowes is unopposed. After the preceding enthusiast, the voice of Mr. Cowes falls soothingly as a stream among the heather. He is tall, meagre, bald; he wears a very broad black necktie, his hand saws up and down. Mr. Cowes’ tone is the quietly venomous; in a few minutes you believe in his indignation far more than in that of Mr. Cullen. He makes a point and pauses to observe the effect upon his hearers. He prides himself upon his grammar, goes back to correct a concord, emphasises eccentricities of pronunciation; for instance, he accents ‘capitalist’ on the second syllable, and repeats the words with grave challenge to all and sundry. Speaking of something which he wishes to stigmatise as a misnomer, he exclaims: ‘It’s what I call a misnomy!’ And he follows the assertion with an awful suspense of utterance. He brings his speech to a close exactly with the end of the tenth minute, and, on sitting down, eyes his unknown neighbour with wrathful intensity for several moments.
Who will follow? A sound comes from the very back of the room, such a sound that every head turns in astonished search for the source of it. Such voice has the wind in garret-chimneys on a winter night. It is a thin wail, a prelude of lamentation; it troubles the blood. The speaker no one seems to know; he is a man of yellow visage, with head sunk between pointed shoulders, on his crown a mere scalp-lock. He seems to be afflicted with a disease of the muscles; his malformed body quivers, the hand he raises shakes paralytic. His clothes are of the meanest; what his age may be it is impossible to judge. As his voice gathers strength, the hearers begin to feel the influence of a terrible earnestness. He does not rant, he does not weigh his phrases; the stream of bitter prophecy flows on smooth and dark. He is supplying the omission in Mutimer’s harangue, is bidding his class know itself and chasten itself, as an indispensable preliminary to any great change in the order of things. He cries vanity upon all these detailed schemes of social reconstruction. Are we ready for it? he wails. Could we bear it, if they granted it to us? It is all good and right, but hadn’t we better first make ourselves worthy of such freedom? He begins a terrible arraignment of the People,—then, of a sudden, his voice has ceased. You could hear a pin drop. It is seen that the man has fallen to the ground; there arises a low moaning; people press about him.
They carry him into the coffee-shop. It was a fit. In five minutes he is restored, but does not come back to finish his speech.
There is an interval of disorder. But surely we are not going to let the meeting end in this way. The chairman calls for the next speaker, and he stands forth in the person of a rather smug little shopkeeper, who declares that he knows of no single particular in which the working class needs correction. The speech undeniably falls fiat. Will no one restore the tone of the meeting?
Mr. Kitshaw is the man! Now we shall have broad grins. Mr. Kitshaw enjoys a reputation for mimicry; he takes off music-hall singers in the bar-parlour of a Saturday night. Observe, he rises, hems, pulls down his waistcoat; there is bubbling laughter. Mr. Kitshaw brings back the debate to its original subject; he talks of the Land. He is a little haphazard at first, but presently hits the mark in a fancy picture of a country still in the hands of aborigines, as yet unannexed by the capitalist nations, knowing not the meaning of the verb ‘exploit.’
‘Imagine such a happy land, my friends; a land, I say, which nobody hasn’t ever thought of “developing the resources” of,—that’s the proper phrase, I believe. There are the people, with clothing enough for comfort and—ahem!—good manners, but, mark you, no more. No manufacture of luxurious skirts and hulsters and togs o’ that kind by the exploited classes. No, for no exploited classes don’t exist! All are equal, my friends. Up an’ down the fields they goes, all day long, arm-in-arm, Jack and Jerry, aye, and Liza an’ Sairey Ann; for they have equality of the sexes, mind you! Up an’ down the fields, I say, in a devil-may-care sort of way, with their sweethearts and their wives. No factory smoke, dear no! There’s the rivers, with tropical plants a-shading the banks, O my! There they goes up an’ down in their boats, devil-may-care, a-strumming on the banjo,’—he imitated such action,—‘and a-singing their nigger minstrelsy with light ‘earts. Why? ‘Cause they ain’t got no work to get up to at ‘arf-past five next morning. Their time’s their own! That’s the condition of an unexploited country, my friends!’
Mr. Kitshaw had put everyone in vast good humour. You might wonder that his sweetly idyllic picture did not stir bitterness by contrast; it were to credit the English workman with too much imagination. Resonance of applause rewarded the sparkling rhetorician. A few of the audience availed themselves of the noise to withdraw, for the clock showed that it was close upon ten, and public-houses shut their doors early on Sunday.