can't make them. The most they'll do is sneer about him."
Struthers still fidgetted with the blotter, with his thin, very-red, hairy hand, and abstractedly stared at the desk in front of him.
"And what does all that mean, in your estimation, Mr Somers?" he asked dryly, looking nervously up.
"That you'll never get them to act. You'll never get Labour, or any of the Socialists, to make a revolution. They just won't act. Only the Anarchists might—and they're too few."
"I'm afraid they are growing more."
"Are they? Of that I know nothing. I should have thought they were growing fewer."
Mr Struthers did not seem to hear this. At least he did not answer. He sat with his head dropped, fingering the blotter, rather like a boy who is being told things he hates to hear, but which he doesn't deny.
At last he looked up, and the fighting look was in the front of his eyes.
"It may be as you say, Mr Somers," he replied. "Men may not be ready yet for any great change. That does not make the change less inevitable. It's coming, and it's got to come. If it isn't here to-day, it will be here next century, at least. Whatever you may say, the socialistic and communal ideal is a great ideal, which will be fulfilled when men are ready. We aren't impatient. If revolution seems a premature jump—and perhaps it does—then we can go on, step by step, towards where we intend to arrive at last. And that is, State Ownership, and International Labour Control. The General Confederation of Labour, as perhaps you know, does not aim at immediate revolutions. It wants to make the great revolution by degrees. Step by step, by winning political victories in each country, by having new laws passed by our insistence, we intend to advance more slowly, but more surely towards the goal we have in sight.
"Now, Mr Somers, you are no believer in capitalism, and in this industrial system as we have it. If I judge you correctly from your writings, you are no lover of the great Washed Middle Classes. They are more than washed, they are washed out. And I think in your writings you
