give you a full opportunity to state your case. I will
support you as long as I am in this chair."

Dawson held out his hand. "Thank you," he said simply. The two men
clasped hands and looked into one another's eyes. "It is a good
country, Dawson," said the Chief--"a jolly good country, and worth big
risks to oneself. It will be saved by plain, honest men if it is to be
saved at all. Our worst enemies are not the Germans, but our
flabby-fibred political classes at home. The people are just crying
out to be told what to do, and to be made to do it. Yet nobody tells
them. Don't let the Cabinet browbeat you, and smother you with
plausible sophistries. Just talk plain English to them, Dawson."

"I will. For once in their sheltered lives they shall hear the truth."

For what follows, Dawson is my principal, but not my sole authority. I
have tested what he told me in every way that I could, and the test
has held. Somehow--I am prepared to believe in the manner told by
him--he forced the Cabinet to give him the authority for which he
asked, and he used it in the manner which I shall tell of. He held
what is always a first-rate advantage: he knew exactly what he wanted,
no more or less, and was prepared to get it or retire from official
life. Those who gave to him authority gave it reluctantly--gave it
because they were between the devil and the deep sea. They would
gladly have thrown over Dawson, but they could not throw over the
civil and military powers who supported him in his demands. And had
they thrown him over they would have been left to deal by their
incompetent unaided selves with a strike in the midst of war which
might have spread like a prairie fire over the whole country. But
though they bent before Dawson, I am very sure that they did not love
him, and that he will never be the Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan
Police. Against his name in the official books stands a mark of the
most deadly blackness. Strength and success are never pardoned by
weakness and failure.

When at last Dawson was summoned to the sitting; of the War Committee,
he found himself in the presence of some half a dozen elderly and
embarrassed-looking gentlemen arranged round a big table. They had
been discussing him, and trying to devise some decent civil means to
get rid of him. He and his story of the coming strike in the North
were a distressful inconvenience, an intolerable intrusion upon a
quiet life. When he entered, he was without