with this characteristic, whatever it might be, that I fixed in my mind several passages that seemed to me to be particularly distinctive of the posture of his mind towards the audience. I give one or two of them as nearly word for word as I can remember:
'I feel quite at home in addressing you here in Glasgow this afternoon. It is just such a meeting as this that I am accustomed to address when at home in London on Sundays. I find before me here just the same type of audience, mostly working men, looking by no means particularly happy and, if you will forgive my saying so, by no means particularly well-fed or well-clothed. And I feel that what I have to say to you this afternoon is just what I should feel compelled to say were I speaking instead at Hammersmith Bridge or in Hyde Park in London.
'Coming along to the meeting this afternoon our comrade the secretary was telling me that there is a distressing amount of unemployment in Glasgow, and that huge unemployed demonstrations have been held. That is just what is told me wherever I go to speak. And I never hear, or read, or think about it but my blood boils, and indignation rises in my heart, against the whole system of what is so proudly called "modern civilisation."
'I can speak, perhaps, on this subject of work with less prejudice or personal bias than most men. I am neither what you would call a working man nor an idle rich man, though in a way I am a bit of both—with, as some folk might say, the bad qualities of both and the good qualities of neither! I am, as some of you know, a literary man and an artist of a kind. I work both with my head and my hands: but not from compulsion as most of you and my comrades here do, nor merely as a sort of rich man's pastime, as doubtless some of the Dukes do. I have never known what I fear many of you unfortunately have known, actual poverty—the pain of to-day's hunger and cold, and the fear of to-morrow's, or the dread of a master's voice, or the hopeless despair of unemployment. I have, I truly believe, lived as happy a
