“Oh, and there’s the old thing against them, of course--the handling of imperial and local affairs by one body. Anybody’s good enough to attend to the Baghdad Railway, and nobody’s too good to attend to the town pump. Is it any wonder the Germans beat them in their own shops and Russia walks into Thibet? The eternal marvel is that they stand where they do.”
“Oh--at the top! Think of what you mean when you say ‘England.’”
“I see that the demand for a tariff on manufactured goods is growing,” Williams remarked, “even the anti-food-tax organs are beginning to shout for that.”
“If they had put it on twenty years ago,” said Lorne, “there would be no twelve million people making a problem for want of work, and it would be a good deal easier to do imperial business today.”
“You’ll find,” said John Murchison, removing his pipe, “that protection’ll have to come first over there. They’ll put up a fence and save their trade--in their own good time, not next week or next year--and when they’ve done that they’ll talk to us about our big ideas--not before. And if Wallingham hadn’t frightened them with the imperial job, he never would have got them to take up the other. It’s just his way of getting both done.”
“I hope you’re right, Father,” said Lorne, with a covert glance at his watch. “Horace--Mrs Williams--I’ll have to get you to excuse me. I have an engagement at eight.”
He left them with a happy spring in his step, left them looking after him, talking of him, with pride and congratulation. Only Stella, with a severe lip and a disapproving eye, noted the direction he took as he left the house.
Peter Macfarlane had carried the big Bible up the pulpit steps of Knox Church, and arranged the glass of water and the notices to be given out beside it, twice every Sunday for twenty years. He was a small spare man, with thin grey hair that fell back from the narrow dome of his forehead to his coat collar, decent and severe. He ascended the pulpit exactly three minutes before the minister did; and the dignity with which he put one foot before the other made his appearance a ceremonious feature of the service and a thing quoted. “I was there before Peter” was a triumphant evidence of punctuality. Dr Drummond would have liked to make it a test. It seemed to him no great thing to expect the people of Knox Church to be there before Peter.