He still kept his College by the Dock Gates going, notwithstanding his election to Parliament. Indeed, he was still as much the servant of Poplar as of Woolwich.
Parliament, of course, added enormously to his work. Friends urged him to give up several of his public posts. He was advised to retire from the Asylums Board, and doubtless would have done so but for a powerful appeal sent to him not to desert the Board's children. He wanted to resign from the Poplar Board of Guardians, of which he had then been Chairman for half a dozen successive years; but all parties in the borough pleaded with him to remain, and the Conservatives and Liberals withdrew their candidates in his ward in order that he might be returned unopposed. He was showered with requests to remain for the sake of the poor. At last he agreed, on the understanding that he should give less time to the work. This was perhaps an unwise decision, for owing to the slackening of his personal vigilance the administration was besmirched by irregularities which of course laid the Chairman's Poor Law policy open to the attacks of his opponents.
The only post he gave up was that on the Poplar Borough Council. The Labour League would not hear of his resigning from the London County Council, and within a year of his election to Parliament, Poplar re-elected him to the L.C.C. with a majority of over 1,600.
The demands made upon him to address public meetings in other parts of the country became terrific after Woolwich. I found him one afternoon turning over the pages of his engagement book with a worried look.
"I'm just wondering whether I can do it," he said. "I find I'm booked to speak at thirteen different meetings at different places within the next fortnight, and I've just got a pressing appeal to speak at another within the same time."
The appeals came from the churches, from temperance societies, from Adult Sunday Schools, from P.S.A.'s, as well as from Labour organisations.
The Labour Party, which was then organising for its great political triumph of 1906, had his first consideration always. He addressed Labour meetings all over the country, nearly always with an audience of three or four thousand. He was at Glasgow, Birmingham, Leicester, Plymouth, Liverpool, Exeter, Darlington, Ipswich, Chatham, Newcastle, Blackburn, Barnard Castle, Huddersfield, Edinburgh, Cardiff, all within a few months.
Everywhere he turned Mr. Chamberlain's tariff proposals into ridicule. He made his great Birmingham audience laugh the loudest. He told that and other audiences:—
Mr. Chamberlain has shown you two loaves, the Free Trade loaf and the Protection loaf.
"There's hardly any difference between them," he tells you. "Why make all this fuss?"
Let him take the two loaves down a Birmingham court and ask a poor woman with children to cut them up. She'll soon tell him the difference between the solid Free Trade loaf and the spongy Protectionist loaf. You trust the mother of a family to know the difference between good bread and blown-out pastry.
"Ah, but we must make sacrifices in the interest of the Empire," says Mr. Chamberlain.
Let him come down our way and talk like that in Poplar. I tried it the other day.
"Times is awful bad just now, Mr. Crooks," said one of a party of women who stopped me on my way to the House of Commons.
"Yes," I said, "but don't you know the new kind of comfort the Imperialists have found for you? They say you belong to an Empire on which the sun never sets. It's so filling, isn't it, when you're hungry?"
"An Empire on which the sun never sets!" cried one of the women, pointing towards her slum tenement. "What's the good of talking to us like that? Why, the sun never rises on our court!"
"That may be," I say, "but you've got to pay more for your bread and your meat, all in the interests of the Empire. You've got to learn to make sacrifices for the Empire."
"Look here, Will," says the eldest among them; "I've known you since you was in petticoats, and you've never deceived me yet. Wot's the use of talking to us about sacrifices when we can't make both ends meet as it is?"
"Both ends meet!" exclaimed one of the women. "We think we are lucky if we can get one end meat and the other end bread."
"Wot's it all about, Mr. Crooks?" asked another. "Here's bread gone up a ha'penny a loaf. And sugar and tea's gone up. And the children say they don't get so many sweets for a farthing now as they used to."
"And," I added, "meat's likely to go up too—all in the interests of the Empire. Twopence a pound more for Colonial mutton."
"What!" they cried in a body. "Twopence more for mutton!"
"Haven't you heard?" I went on. "The Tariff Reformers have a great scheme to bind the Empire together by letting the Colonies charge us more for our food. If you don't agree with them they'll call you little Englanders."
"That's just it," said one of the women. "If I'm to pay another twopence a pound for meat my children will soon be Little Englanders!"