"It reminds me of a group of boys I saw coming home from a football match.
"'How did yer get on?' they were asked by other lads in the street.
"'Won.'
"'How many?'
"'Seven to nothing.'
"'Been playing a blind school?'"
And then Crooks would go on: "Well, we workers have been the blind school, and we have been allowing other classes to score goals against us all the time. If we haven't been blind we've certainly been blindfold. Tear the bandage off your eyes. Be men."
Behind all his banter there was a serious message in all his Sunday morning addresses.
"Labour may be the new force by which God is going to help forward the regeneration of the world," he told his hearers. "Heaven knows we need a little more earnestness in our national life to-day, and if the best-born cannot give it, the so-called base-born may. We common people have done it before. Who knows but what it is God's will that we should do it again? We can all afford to laugh at that dear lady, bless her, who could not bear the idea that some of the Apostles were fishermen, and who solemnly asked her minister whether there was not some authority for believing that they were owners of smacks.
"We working men are gaining power. Let us see that we also gain knowledge to use the power, not to abuse it. Parliament is supposed to protect the weak against the strong. It doesn't pan out like that. After all these years of popular education, isn't it about time we taught the dialectical champions in the House of Commons that the people are the creators of Parliament, and that we demand as its creators that Parliament should be at the service of the people and all the people, instead of at the service of the powerful and the wealthy?