f Jingalo had at his heels that terror of his
own planting driving him on. Perhaps nothing else would have given him
the courage.

The day for the last Council meeting had arrived, the last before the
closing of that long session of Parliament which, beginning in February,
had run on at intervals into November. Then only a brief month, and the
winter session with the new Government program would open.

It was to this Council that the Cabinet's latest scheme for squeezing
the Bishops out of the Constitution was to be presented; and for that to
be possible, since he was so great a stickler for constitutional
propriety, the King's consent had been necessary. A few days before,
therefore, the Prime Minister had once more formally submitted the
question; and the King had given his leave. "Produce what you like, Mr.
Premier; I will no longer stand in your way."

The brief autumn session was closing with a clangor of agitation which
had not been heard in Jingalo for half a century at least. Everybody
outside the machinery of party was profoundly dissatisfied with the
parliamentary system and with all its doings and undoings; and this
general dissatisfaction was being quaintly expressed by a refusal to let
Parliament rise. The Women Chartists were battering at its closed doors;
and from peep-holes and other points of vantage within, smiling and
indifferent legislators saw those bruised bodies, those strangely
obsessed minds, those indomitable spirits carried off to magisterial
lack of judgment and to prison.

With a good deal more concern they saw strikes breaking out in their own
constituencies, and riot becoming the normal accompaniment of the
industrial demand for better conditions. Three strike leaders were in
prison under sentence of death for having killed by purposeful accident
a few over-zealous policemen; and from great working centers over a
hundred miles away thousands of men were marching to demand remittance
of the death penalty.

The Government was, in consequence, in a great hurry to get the session
closed. It was an undignified scramble of the red-tape worms of various
departments to be well out of the way before those slow, heavily shod
feet of labor arrived upon the scene. At every town they came to they
stopped, made inflammatory speeches, gathered funds and adherents, and
then, a swelled body of discontent, marched stolidly on toward the
capital; and this not from one point alone but from half-a-dozen a