s bit of garden, and smoke, and Sunday clothes, and a day or so's
holiday now and then. He was a contented, decent, God-fearing citizen,
the backbone of the whole nation, and he has been blotted away from the
face of the earth. They work now passively, like dumb brutes, to resist
starvation, and human character isn't strong enough for such a strain.
The public houses thrive, and the pawnshops are full. But the children
haven't enough to eat. They are growing up lank, white, prematurely aged,
the spectres to dance us statesmen down into hell."

"You are overwrought, dear," she said, gently. "You have been in the
hands of a man whose object it was to show you only one side of all
this."

"I have sought for the truth," Mannering answered, "and I have seen it. I
have learned more in three weeks than all the Commissions and statistics
and Board-of-Trade figures have taught me in five years."

"And yet," she said, thoughtfully, "you hesitated about that last Navy
vote. Don't you see that the imperialism which you are a little disposed
to shrug your shoulders at is the most logical and complete cure for all
this? We must extend and maintain our colonies, and people them with our
surplus population."

He shook his head.

"That is not a policy which would ever appeal to me," he answered. "It
is like an external operation to remove a malady which is of internal
origin. Either our social laws or our political systems are at fault
when our trade leaves us, and our labouring classes are unable to earn
a fair wage. That is the position we are in to-day."

She rose to her feet, and walked restlessly up and down the room.
Mannering had the look of a crushed man. She watched him critically.
Writers in magazines and reviews had often made a study of his character.
She remembered a brilliant contributor to a recent review, who had dwelt
upon a certain lack of cohesion in his constitution, an inability to
relegate sentiment to its proper place in dealing with the great workaday
problems of the world. Conscientious, but never to be trusted, was the
last anomalous but luminous criticism. Was this frame of mind of his a
sign of it, she wondered? His place in politics was fixed and sure. What
right had he, as a man of principle, with a great following, to run even
the risk of being led away by false prophets? A certain hardness stole
into her face as she watched him. She tried to steel herself against the
sight of his suffering, and thou