Maraton sat for a moment almost silent. He looked down the table, along the line of faces, coarse faces most of them, of varying strength, plebeian, forceful here and there, with one almost common quality of stubbornness. They were men of the people, all of them, men of the narrow ways. What words of his could take them into the further land? He raised his head. He felt curiously depressed, immeasurably out of touch with these who should have been his helpmates. The sight of Julia just then would have been a joy to him.
"Perhaps," Maraton began, with a little sigh, "I had better first explain my own position. You are each of you Members of Parliament for a particular district. The interests of each of you are bound up in the welfare of the operatives who send you to Parliament. It's your job to look after them, and I've no doubt you do it well. Only, you see, it's a piecemeal sort of business to call yourselves the representatives of Labour in its broadest sense. I belong more, I am afraid, to the school of theorists. In my mind I bring all Labour together, all the toilers of the world who are slaves to the great Moloch, Capital. You have an immense middle class here in England, who are living in fatness and content. The keynote of my creed is that these people have twice the incomes they ought to have, and Labour half as much. That, of course, is just the simple, oldfashioned, illogical Socialism with which you probably all started life, and which doubtless lies in some forgotten chamber of the minds of all of you. You've given it up because you've decided that it was unpractical. I haven't. I believe that if we were to pull down the pillars which hold up the greatness of this nation, I believe that if we were to lay her in ruins about us, that in the years to come--perhaps I ought to say the generations to come--the rebuilding, stone by stone, would be on the sane principle which, once established, would last for eternity, of an absolute partnership between Capital and Labour, a partnership which I say would be eternal because, in course of time, the two would become one."
They all looked at one another a little blankly. Peter Dale grunted with expressionless face and relit his pipe, which had gone out during these few moments of intense listening. Graveling reached out his hand and took a cigar from a box which had been placed upon the table. Henneford and his neighbour exchanged glances, which culminated in a stealthy wink. Alone at the table David Ross sat like a figure of stone, his mouth a little open, something of the light in his face.