The light in his eyes decided Helen. She, too, belonged to a free people.
“Yes,” she said, “we’ll stand or fall together.”
He grasped, in his boy’s way, the hand of a good comrade. “We’ll break the International Newspaper Ring, or it shall break us.”
She was quite ready to buckle on his armor. “Government by newspaper must end—if civilization is to go on. One has always smiled at the notion that Saul Hartz can put in any government he chooses and turn it out if it doesn’t please him, but in the last three weeks one’s eyes have been opened to many things. And if the Breit Combine joins with the U. P. as you declare it will, my own country will be in the same plight.”
“Yes,” said John Endor, “now you really see the malignant growth that lies at the very root of the Anglo-Saxon world. There can be no hope of a stable peace while this king of all grafters is free to go on. Well, thank God, the eyes of some of us are open at last. I’ll go down to the House this afternoon and air my voice if I get a chance.”
“Do,” she said. “All power to it. Meanwhile, I’ll go and look for a little house. There are five hundred pounds in my stocking—did I tell you?—his money, alas!—but I hope honestly earned.”
John took from his pocket a sheaf of notes written in pencil. Much new material had come to him in the course of the week-end at Doe Hill for the speech he was meditating in the House of Commons. “But don’t let us deceive ourselves,” he said. “They are not in the least likely to listen to a private member. Strong as this indictment is it will impress neither the Cabinet nor the rank and file. They are men of straw. The U. P. put them where they are and it can remove them to-morrow. At least, they believe it can. Shade of Gladstone and Bright! Shade of Burke and Pitt! that a newspaper trust should have them all in its pocket.”
As he got up from the table, his face, which still bore the marks of recent ill-usage, looked strained and curiously old. But any hint of weakness was effaced by the eyes which burnt with lustre and intensity.
XXIX
JOHN ENDOR went down to the House of Commons and made the speech of his life. Soon after five, when he rose to benches more than half empty, to demand a remedy against that ever-growing evil, the menace of the Newspaper Trust, many honorable members smiled. In a few brief years, the disintegration of the Mother of Parliaments was all but complete. This crowd of time-servers and adventurers, composed in the main of bagmen and trade-union officials were under no illusion as to the terms of their tenure. These hungry ravens knew better than to peck the gentle hand that fed them.