fellows like you for guides. It only needs the miners to get on to me now and shove me into that black abyss for me to be a dead man. No, thank you, I’m going back to where I came from.”
With this he begins climbing up the ladder again.
“Oh, Professor.”
“Oh, Professor, don’t get so angry,” cry the two detectives as they follow him up the ladder.
VI
Akaji Akai, having returned to Tokyo, is standing on the platform at the Industrial Club, resplendent in swallow-tail and gold chain, delivering an eloquent address before a meeting of the Association for the Harmony between Capital and Labour, held to discuss the labour problem.
The audience includes Viscount Shibugaki, members of the House of Peers, directors, business men, priests, doctors and professors, one and all members of the bourgeois class.
“ guided by two detectives I descended I can’t tell you how many hundreds of feet into the mine and then literally crawled along in the pitch blackness until I approached the workings. There I found men and women miners stripped to the skin, holding their lamps in one hand and silently digging away at the coal. I was moved to the depths of my heart.”
He paused to take a glass of water.
The audience listen to his words with great interest.
