“I hope so too,” I said; but I knew Crawleigh to be only one of many who regretted that the strike had not been fought to a finish.
As I began my articles, I noticed sadly that neither he nor Neave, neither the capitalist press which called our paper “bolshevistic” nor the labour sheets which damned us with faint, patronizing praise suggested that strikes and lock-outs ought to be as impossible in a civilized state as a wheat-corner or that, whoever was to blame and whoever was punished, the noncombatant majority suffered most.
“Human nature being what it is . . .” began Sir Roger Dainton, with a fine affectation of political wisdom, when I put this view before him.
I had driven Barbara to luncheon at Crowley Court; and throughout the meal our host droned of high taxation without considering the capital loss of a strike.
“Every one’s the poorer for a struggle that has changed nothing and proved nothing,” I said.
“In time, perhaps, the agitators will see that,” answered Lady Dainton, who had been expatiating, from the other end of the table, on class-hatred and proving in alternate sentences that the man Thomas was responsible for all this unrest and that Mr. Thomas really seemed the only person who would stand up to these bolshevists.
It was at this time that the secret funds on which labour disturbances throve were discovered—by her—to come from Irish organizations in America and Jewish societies in Russia; perhaps her brain was tired, but in the course of one brief conversation the Indian home-ruler, the modernist in religion, the eccentric in music and the individualist in dress were all found to be tainted with “bolshevism”. Their predecessors, I recalled, had all been anarchists.
“I must send you a little book on The Soviet Peril,” promised Lady Dainton, who at other times and in her untiring search for whipping-boys had sent me pamphlets on A Short Way with Profiteers.
I refrained from commenting on her husband’s incautious boast that he had increased his capital twenty per cent. since 1914.
“Are these agitators actually to be found in England?,” I asked.