Just for an instant the orator was disconcerted as a laugh ran through the audience; but habit, joined to a natural gift of public speaking, came to his aid, and he rejoined: “Brother working-men, I say ditto to what has fallen from our friend ’ere upon my right. We all are working-men. Some of us, like our friend, work with their ’ands, and others with their ’eds. In either case, the Land is what we ’ave to get at as an article of prime necessity.”
Rapidly he sketched a state of things in which a happy population, drawn from the slums, but all instinct with agricultural knowledge, would be settled on the land, each on his little farm, and all devoted to intensive culture in the most modern form. Trees would be all cut down, because they only “’arbour” birds that eat the corn. Hedges would all be extirpated, for it is known to every one that mice and rats and animals of every kind live under them, and that they only serve to shelter game. Each man would own a gun and be at liberty to kill a “rabbut” or a “’are”—“animals, as we say at college, feery naturrey, and placed by Providence upon the land.”
These noble sentiments evoked applause, which was a little mitigated by an interjection from a man in gaiters, with a sunburnt face, of: “Mister, if every one is to have a gun and shoot, ’ow long will these ’ere ’ares and rabbuts last?”
A little farther on, as thinly covered by his indecently transparent veil of reciprocity as a bare-footed dancer in her Grecian clothes, or a tall ostrich under an inch of sand, and yet as confident as either of them that the essential is concealed, a staunch Protectionist discoursed. With copious notes, to which he turned at intervals, when he appealed to those statistics which can be made in any question to fit every side, he talked of loss of trade. “Friends, we must tax the foreigner. It is this way, you see, our working classes have to compete with other nations, all of which enjoy protective duties. I ask you, is it reasonable that we should let a foreign article come into England?”
Here a dour-looking Scotsman almost spat out the words: “Man, can ye no juist say Great Britain?” and received a bow and “Certainly, my friend, I am not here to wound the sentiments of any man . . . as I was saying, is it reasonable that goods should come to England . . . I mean Great Britain, duty free, and yet articles we manufacture have to pay heavy duties in any foreign port?”
“’Ow about bread?” came from a voice upon the outskirts of the crowd.
The speaker reddened, and resumed: “My friend, man doth not live by bread alone; still, I understand the point. A little dooty upon corn, say five shillings in the quarter, would not hurt any one. We’ve got to do it. The foreigner is the enemy. I am a Christian; but yet, readin’ as I often do the Sermon on the Mount, I never saw we had to lie down in the dust and let ourselves be trampled on.
“Who are to be the inheritors of the earth? Our Lord says, ‘Blessed are the meek; they shall inherit it.’”
He paused, and was about to clinch his argument, when a tall Irishman, after expectorating judiciously upon a vacant space between two listeners, shot in: “Shure, then, the English are the meekest of the lot, for they have got the greater part of it.”
At other gatherings Socialists held forth under the red flag. “That banner, comrades, which ’as braved a ’undred fights, and the mere sight of which makes the Capitalistic bloodsucker tremble as he feels the time approach when Lybor shall come into its inheritance and the Proletariat shyke off its chaine and join ’ands all the world over, despizin’ ryce and creed and all the artificial obstructions that a designin’ Priest-’ood and a blood-stained Plutocracy ’ave placed between them to distract their attention from the great cause of Socialism, the great cause that mykes us comrades . . . ’ere, keep off my ’oof, you blighter, with your ammunition wagons. . . .”