again dare to say that the working men of England care nothing for their
country. Even the manners of railway travel have improved. I was
travelling in a third-class compartment of a crowded train the other
day; we were twenty in the compartment, but it seemed a pity to leave
any one behind, and we made room for number twenty-one. Nothing but a
very kindly human feeling could have packed us tight enough for this.
Yet now is the time that has been chosen by some of these pensive
gentlemen that I spoke of, and by some of these excitable journalists,
to threaten us with class-war, and to try to make our flesh creep by
conjuring up the horrors of revolution. I advise them to take their
opinions to the third-class compartment and discuss them there. It is a
good tribunal, for, sooner or later, you will find every one there--even
officers, when they are travelling in mufti at their own expense. I have
visited this tribunal very often, and I have always come away from it
with the same impression, that this people means to win the War. But I
do not travel much in the North of England, so I asked a friend of mine,
whose dealings are with the industrial North, what the workpeople of
Lancashire and Yorkshire think of the War. He said, 'Their view is very
simple: they mean to win it; and they mean to make as much money out of
it as ever they can.' Certainly, that is very simple; but before you
judge them, put yourselves in their place. There are great outcries
against profiteers, for making exorbitant profits out of the War, and
against munition workers, for delaying work in order to get higher
wages. I do not defend either of them; they are unimaginative and
selfish, and I do not care how severely they are dealt with; but I do
say that the majority of them are not wicked in intention. A good many
of the more innocent profiteers are men whose sin is that they take an
offer of two shillings rather than an offer of eighteenpence for what
cost them one and a penny. Some of us, in our weaker moments, might be
betrayed into doing the same. As for the munition workers, I remember