Williams remarked;
and his eye had the spark of the practical politician. "Can't you hear
'em at it, eh?"

"It scares them out of everything but hand-to-mouth politics. Any other
remedy is too heroic. They go on pointing out and contemplating and
grieving, with their percentages of misery and degeneration; and they go
on poulticing the cancer with benevolence--there are people over there
who want the State to feed the schoolchildren! Oh, they're kind, good,
big-hearted people; and they've got the idea that if they can only give
enough away everything will come right. I was talking with a man one
day, and I asked him whether the existence of any class justified
governing a great country on the principle of an almshouse. He asked
me who the almsgivers ought to be, in any country. Of course it was
tampering with my figure--in an almshouse there aren't any; but that's
the way it presents itself to the best of them. Another fellow was
frantic at the idea of a tax on foreign food--he nearly cried--but would
be very glad to see the Government do more to assist emigration to the
colonies. I tried to show him it would be better to make it profitable
to emigrate first, but I couldn't make him see it.

"Oh, and there's the old thing against them, of course--the handling of
imperial and local affairs by one body. Anybody's good enough to attend
to the Baghdad Railway, and nobody's too good to attend to the town
pump. Is it any wonder the Germans beat them in their own shops and
Russia walks into Thibet? The eternal marvel is that they stand where
they do."

"At the top," said Mr Williams.

"Oh--at the top! Think of what you mean when you say 'England.'"

"I see that the demand for a tariff on manufactured goods is growing,"
Williams remarked, "even the anti-food-tax organs are beginning to shout
for that."

"If they had put it on twenty years ago," said Lorne, "there would be no
twelve million people making a problem for want of work, and it would be
a good deal easier to do imperial business today."

"You'll find," said John Murchison, removing his pipe, "that
protection'll have to come first over there. They'll put up a fence
and save their trade--in their own good time, not next week or next
year--and when they've done that they'll talk to us about our big
ideas--not before. And if Wallingham hadn't frightened them with the
imperial job, he never would have got them to take up the other. It's
just his way of getting bo