They
think I'm stirrin' up the men at home and desertin' the cause o' the
lads at the front. Man, I'm keepin' them straight. If I didna fight
their battles on a sound economic isshue, they would take the dorts and
be at the mercy of the first blagyird that preached revolution. Me and
my like are safety-valves, if ye follow me. And dinna you make ony
mistake, Mr Brand. The men that are agitating for a rise in wages are
not for peace. They're fighting for the lads overseas as much as for
themselves. There's not yin in a thousand that wouldna sweat himself
blind to beat the Germans. The Goavernment has made mistakes, and maun
be made to pay for them. If it were not so, the men would feel like a
moose in a trap, for they would have no way to make their grievance
felt. What for should the big man double his profits and the small man
be ill set to get his ham and egg on Sabbath mornin'? That's the
meaning o' Labour unrest, as they call it, and it's a good thing, says
I, for if Labour didna get its leg over the traces now and then, the
spunk o' the land would be dead in it, and Hindenburg could squeeze it
like a rotten aipple.'

I asked if he spoke for the bulk of the men.

'For ninety per cent in ony ballot. I don't say that there's not plenty
of riff-raff--the pint-and-a-dram gentry and the soft-heads that are
aye reading bits of newspapers, and muddlin' their wits with foreign
whigmaleeries. But the average man on the Clyde, like the average man
in ither places, hates just three things, and that's the Germans, the
profiteers, as they call them, and the Irish. But he hates the Germans
first.'

'The Irish!' I exclaimed in astonishment.

'Ay, the Irish,' cried the last of the old Border radicals. 'Glasgow's
stinkin' nowadays with two things, money and Irish. I mind the day when
I followed Mr Gladstone's Home Rule policy, and used to threep about
the noble, generous, warm-hearted sister nation held in a foreign
bondage. My Goad! I'm not speakin' about Ulster, which is a dour,
ill-natured den, but our own folk all the same. But the men that will
not do a hand's turn to help the war and take the chance of our
necessities to set up a bawbee rebellion are hateful to Goad and man.
We treated them like pet lambs and that's the thanks we get. They're
coming over here in thousands to tak the jobs of the lads that are
doing their duty. I was speakin' last week to a widow woman that keeps
a wee dairy down the Dalmarnock Road. She ha