"Every one of our members," Fenn pointed out, "is in direct
communication with the local secretary of each town in which his
industry is represented. You see these?"
He paused and laid his hand on a little heap of telegraph forms,
on which one word was typed.
"These," he continued, "are all ready to be dispatched the second
that we hear from Mr. Stenson that is to say if we should hear
unfavourably. They are divided into batches, and each batch will
be sent from a different post-office, so that there shall be no
delay. We calculate that in seven hours, at the most, the
industrial pulse of the country will have ceased to beat."
"How long has your organisation taken to build up?" Julian
enquired.
"Exactly three months," David Sands observed, turning around in
his swing chair from the desk at which he had been writing. "The
scheme was started a few days after your article in the British
Review. We took your motto as our text `Coordination and
cooperation.'"
They found their way into the clubroom, and at luncheon, later on,
Julian strove to improve his acquaintance with the men who were
seated around him. Some of them were Members of Parliament with
well-known names, others were intensely local, but all seemed
earnest and clear-sighted. Phineas Cross commenced to talk about
war generally. He had just returned from a visit with other
Labour Members to the front, although it is doubtful whether the
result had been exactly in accordance with the intentions of the
powers who had invited him.
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