"Good stuff, sir," he declared approvingly, as he passed it back.
"After dinner I am mostly a man of peace--even when Fenn comes
yapping around," he added, looking after the disappearing figure
of the secretary. "But I make no secret of this. I tumbled to it
from the first that this was a great proposition, this
amalgamation of Labour. It makes a power of us, even though it
may, as you, Mr. Orden, said in one of your articles, bring us to
the gates of revolution. But it was all I could do to bring
myself to sit down at the same table with Penn and his friend
Bright. You see," he explained, "there may be times when you are
forced into doing a thing that fundamentally you disapprove of and
you know is wrong. I disapprove of this war, and I know it's
wrong--it's a foul mess that we've been got into by those who
should have known better--but I ain't like Fenn about it. We're
in it, and we've got to get out of it, not like cowards but like
Englishmen, and if fighting had been the only way through, then I
should have been for fighting to the last gasp. Fortunately,
we've got into touch with the sensible folk on the other side. If
we hadn't--well, I'll say no more but that I've got two boys
fighting and one buried at Ypres, and I've another, though he's
over young, doing his drill."
"Mr. Cross," Julian said, "you've done me more good than any one
I've talked to since the war began."
"That's right, lad," Cross replied. "You get straight words from
one; and not only that, you get the words of another million
behind me, who feel as I do.
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