didna get its leg over the traces now and then, the spunk o' the
land would be dead in it, and Hindenburg could squeeze it like a
rotten aipple.'

I asked if he spoke for the bulk of the men.

'For ninety per cent in ony ballot. I don't say that there's not
plenty of riff-raff - the pint-and-a-dram gentry and the soft-heads
that are aye reading bits of newspapers, and muddlin' their wits
with foreign whigmaleeries. But the average man on the Clyde, like
the average man in ither places, hates just three things, and that's
the Germans, the profiteers, as they call them, and the Irish. But he
hates the Germans first.'

'The Irish!' I exclaimed in astonishment.

'Ay, the Irish,' cried the last of the old Border radicals. 'Glasgow's
stinkin' nowadays with two things, money and Irish. I mind the
day when I followed Mr Gladstone's Home Rule policy, and used
to threep about the noble, generous, warm-hearted sister nation
held in a foreign bondage. My Goad! I'm not speakin' about Ulster,
which is a dour, ill-natured den, but our own folk all the same. But
the men that will not do a hand's turn to help the war and take the
chance of our necessities to set up a bawbee rebellion are hateful to
Goad and man. We treated them like pet lambs and that's the
thanks we get. They're coming over here in thousands to tak the
jobs of the lads that are doing their duty. I was speakin' last week
to a widow woman that keeps a wee dairy down the Dalmarnock
Road. She has two sons, and both in the airmy, one in the Cameronians
and one a prisoner in Germany. She was telling me that she