“Oh, yes. Crowded in a patient sort of way—it’s enough to break your heart—that you don’t see in New York! The poor of New York—well, they’ve got the idea of not being poor. In England they’re resigned, they’ve got callous. My goodness! the fellows out of work over there—you can SEE they’re used to it, see it in the way they slope along and the look in their eyes, poor dumb dogs. They don’t understand it, but they’ve just got to take it! Crowded? Rather!”
“We don’t say ‘rather’ in this country, mister,” observed Stella.
“Well, you can say it now, kiddie.”
They laughed at the little passage—the traveller’s importation of one or two Britishisms had been the subject of skirmish before—but silence fell among them for a moment afterward. They all had in the blood the remembrance of what Lorne had seen.
“Well, you’ve been doing big business,” said Horace Williams.
Lorne shook his head. “We haven’t done any harm,” he said, “but our scheme’s away out of sight now. At least it ought to be.”
“Lost in the bigger issue.” said Williams, and Lorne nodded.
The bigger issue had indeed in the meantime obscured the political horizon, and was widely spreading. A mere colonial project might well disappear in it. England was absorbed in a single contemplation. Wallingham, though he still supported the disabilities of a right honourable evangelist with a gospel of his own, was making astonishing conversions; the edifice of the national economic creed seemed coming over at the top. It was a question of the resistance of the base, and the world was watching.
“Cruickshank says if the main question had been sprung a month ago we wouldn’t have gone over. As it is, on several points we’ve got to wait. If they reject the preferential trade idea over there we shall have done a little good, for any government would be disposed to try to patch up something to take the place of imperial union in that case; and a few thousands more for shipping subsidies and cheap cablegrams would have a great look of strengthening the ties with the colonies. But if they commit themselves to a zollverein with us and the rest of the family you won’t hear much more about the need to foster communications. Communications will foster themselves.”
“Just so,” remarked John Murchison. “They’ll save their money.”