considered myself a people's politician."

"Then the people may very well say 'save me from my friends'," Fardell
answered, grimly. "Mind, I believe you're honest, or you'd be lying on
your back now with a cracked skull. But you are using a great influence
on the wrong side. You're standing between the people and the one
reasonable scheme which has been brought forward which has a fair chance
of changing their condition."

Then Mannering began to understand.

"I oppose the scheme you speak of," he answered, "simply because I don't
believe in it. Every man has a right to his opinion. I don't believe for
a moment that it would improve the present condition of things."

"Then what is your scheme?" Fardell asked.

"My scheme!" Mannering repeated. "I don't quite understand you!"

"Of course you don't," Fardell answered, vigourously. "You can weave
academic arguments, you can make figures and statistics dance to any
damned tune you please. If I tried to argue with you, you'd squash me
flat. And what's it all come to? My pals must starve for the
gratification of your intellectual vanity. You won't listen to Tariff
Reform. Then what do you propose, to light the forges and fill the
mills? Nothing! I say, unless you've got a counter scheme of your own,
you ought to try ours."

"Come, Mr. Fardell," Mannering said, "I can assure you that all I have
said and written is the outcome of honest thought. I--"

"Stop!" Fardell exclaimed. "Honest thought! Yes! Where? In your study.
That's where you theorists do your mischief. You can't make laws for the
people in your study. You can't tell the status of the workingman from
the figures you read in your study. You're like half the smug people in
the world who discuss this question in the railway carriages and in their
clubs. I've heard 'em till I'd like to shove their self-opinionated
arguments down their throats, strip their clothes off their backs, and
send them down to live with my pals, or starve with them. Any little
idiot who buys a penny paper and who's doing pretty well for himself,
thinks he can lay down the law about Free Trade. You're all of one
kidney, sir! You none of you realize this. There are men as good as any
of you, whose wives and children are as dear to them as yours to you,
who've got to see them get thinner and thinner, who don't know where to
get a day's work or lay their hands upon a copper, and all the while
their kids come crying to them for something to e