fruit-sellers, the "hawkers," have entered into the spirit of the campaign with as great self-sacrifice and devotion as the wealthy men have shown. They have cheerfully gone in droves to prison. Some have suffered again and again. The justice of their cause has thrown a glamour even over the gloom of the cell and the degradation of their work. This is not, one would imagine, a good thing for the future effect of the prison-system, but it is the natural issue of the use which our rulers have made of it, in this controversy with men whom General Smuts described as "conscientious objectors." Their repeated imprisonment for such a cause has obliterated the criminal taint and the shame of such punishment, and they have taken "joyfully the spoiling of their goods."
No-one, however, can doubt that the personality of their great leader has been the supreme force in it all. His committal to prison is sufficient to arouse all their powers of self-sacrifice, and they embarass the police-officers in their efforts to be arrested too. Even when he is absent for weeks, his influence moves them with marvellous power. What he would do, or wish, or say, is the pivot on which the lives of many of them turn.
