have seen little children--"

"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily be
worse--or life in a beleagured town."

Murmurs.

They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming out
from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold daylight of
late afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he
was an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and
displayed a disposition to plunge into untimely pathos and indignation.
And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts. "Suppose," he
said, "you found yourself prime minister--"

I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffled
and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge
machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!

And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and
smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that
protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon
of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk with him.

"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.

Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and again
he came back to that discussion. "It's all very easy for your learned
men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children suffer and die.
They don't pick holes up north. They mean business."

He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his
going to work in a factory when he was twelve--"when you Chaps were all
with your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights until he
would fall asleep at his reading.

"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all that
clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter to read a
bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for it, I said.
And I could no' get the book."

Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with round
eyes over the mug.

"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris Robinson.
"And one learns to go straight at a thing without splitting straws. One
gets hold of the Elementals."

(Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)

"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling memory of
Denson, "while men decay and starve."

"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the
alternative is t