ces. The greater proportion were foreigners; scallywags from the
mean streets of every Continental capital; men familiar with prisons;
men who talked of the fraternity of labour, and never did any work; men
full of windy plans for the enrichment of humanity, who themselves must
always borrow and never repay--money, food, shelter, and the other
things for which honest folk give their labour.

If an English Cabinet Minister had offered us an explanation of any
political development we should have had small use for his contribution
in _The Mass_, unless as an advertisement of our importance. For their
teaching, for the text they gave us in our fulminations, we greatly
preferred the rancorous and generally scurrilous vapourings of some
unknown alien dumped upon our shores for the relief and benefit of his
own country.

We wanted no information from Admiralty Lords about the Navy, from
commanding officers about the Army, from pro-Consuls about the Colonies,
or from the Foreign Office about foreign relations. But a deserter or a
man dismissed from either of the Services, a broker ne'er-do-well
rejected as unfit by one of the Colonies, or a foreign agitator with
stories to tell of Britain's duplicity abroad; these were all welcome
fish for our net, and folk whom it was my duty to receive with
respectful attention. From their perjured lips it became my mechanical
duty to extract and publish wisdom for the use of our readers in the
guidance of their lives and the exercise of their rights as citizens and
ratepayers. I became adept at the work, and in the end accomplished it
daily without interest, and with only occasional qualms of conscience.
It was my living.

On a sunshiny morning in June, which I remember very well, the
sandy-haired Rivers brought me a visiting-card upon which I read the
name of "Miss Constance Grey." In one corner of the card the words "Cape
Town" had been crossed out and a London address written over them.

I was engaged at the time with a large, pale, fat man from Stettin,
whose mission it was to show me that the socialist working men of the
Fatherland dearly loved their comrades in England, and that the paying
of taxes for the defence of these islands was a preposterously absurd
thing, for the reason that the Socialists would never allow Germany to
go to war with England or with any other country. "The Destroyers," in
their truckling to Demos, had already cut down Naval and Army estimates
by more than