e writing on
the wall. You know that in one form or another in this country the
democracy must rule. They felt the flame of inspiration when war came
and they helped to win the war. What was their reward? The opulent
portion of them were saddled with an enormous income tax and high prices
of living through bad legislation, which made life a burden. The more
poverty-stricken suffered sympathetically in exactly the same way. We
won the war and we lost the peace. We fastened upon the shoulders of
the deserving, the wage-earning portion of the community, a burden
which their shoulders could never carry a burden which, had we lost the
war instead of winning it, would have led promptly to a revolution and a
measure at least of freedom."

"There is so much of truth in what you say," Tallente declared, "that I
am going to speak to you frankly, even though my frankness seems brutal.
I am going to speak about your friend Miller here. Throughout the war,
Miller was a pacifist. He was dead against killing Germans. He was all
for a peace at any price."

"Steady on," Miller interrupted, suddenly sitting up in his chair.
"Look here, Tallente--"

"Be quiet until I have finished," Tallente went on. "He was concerned
in no end of intrigue with Austrian and German Socialists for
embarrassing the Government and bringing the war to an end. I should
say that but for the fact that our Government at the time was wholly one
of compromise, and was leaning largely upon the Labour vote, he would
have been impeached for high treason."

Miller, who had been busy rolling a cigarette, lit it with ostentatious
carelessness.

"And what of all this?" he demanded.

"Nothing," Tallente replied, "except that it seems a strange thing to
find you now associated with a party who threaten me openly with
political extinction unless I choose to join them. I call this
junkerdom, not socialism."

"No man's principles can remain stable in an unstable world," Miller
pronounced. "I still detest force and compulsion of every sort, but I
recognise its necessity in our present civil life far more than I did in
a war which was, after all, a war of politicians."

Nora Miall leaned over from her chair and laid her hand on Tallente's
arm. After Miller's raucous tones, her voice sounded almost like music.

"Mr. Tallente," she said, "I can understand your feeling aggrieved.
You are not a man whom it is easy to threaten, but remember that after
all we must go on our