"This meeting will do nothing of the sort." This time it was Mr. Blake who spoke, and there was iron in his voice. "None of us thought Mr. Strachan spoke too long when he was dealing with the agitators from Chicago, and let us hear him out, unless we are bigger cowards than the men who work for us."
The meeting endorsed these sentiments, and Angus resumed—
"I speak in the interests of Capital," he said, "when I declare that the fault is not all on the side of the working man. Many of our employers are kind and sympathetic men, but others of them are not. I envy no man among you the wealth he has gathered, but the selfishness of some of our manufacturers is maddening to the working man.
"Some of you know nothing of our trials and our difficulties, and, what is worse, you do not want to know. You pass by the men who are making you rich as though they were the dogs of the street. You sit next pew to them in the kirk, and yet treat them like the dirt beneath your feet. It is doubtless your conviction that you have discharged your whole duty to us when you pay our wages every fortnight. I tell you," he cried passionately, "that is the great fallacy which is yet to prove the undoing of the employers of labour.
"You forget we are men, as well as you, and have higher claims upon you than your pay sheet acknowledges. If our employer dies, we follow him in a body to his grave. If one of us dies, you drive past his hearse with your haughty carriages, or bolt down a side street to avoid the association.
"Tom Lamplough, who has worked for Mr. Thoburn twenty years, buried his only child last Thursday, and his employer spent the afternoon speeding his thoroughbred on the race-track beside the cemetery. At the very moment when Tom was groping about the open grave, struggling with his broken heart and following his daughter with streaming eyes, Mr. Thoburn was bawling out that his filly had done it in two and a quarter—and the clods were falling on the coffin all the while."
At this juncture Thoburn arose, his face the very colour of the corpse he had disdained.
"Will no man throttle this fanatic?" he hoarsely craved. "Must we be insulted thus by a mere working man?"
"I insult no man," retorted his accuser, "when I tell him but the truth. It was you who insulted the dead, and outraged her desolate father because he was but your servant. Is what I say the truth?"
"I decline to answer that," said Thoburn.