"My Scottish friend hardly realizes what he says. I know he has a wife and a sweet little lassie. There is Mr. Blake, the richest of our manufacturers, and he has neither the one nor the other. Now I ask my compatriot, would he trade his lot for that of Mr. Blake with all his money? He answers no. Then who is the richer man--Mr. Blake, or our fellow-workman from auld Scotland?
"Speaking of Scotland, let me say this one word. I lived there till I was a well-grown lad, as did scores of you, and I defy you to contradict me when I say that we are a hundred times better off here than we were among the sheep or behind the ploughs in the old land, neither of which we could hardly ever hope to call our own. Were we not there accounted almost as sheep for the slaughter? How much better were we than the kine we tended? Were not we even driven from the land we rented at a cruel price, that some haughty lord might make a deer-run of the place? What were we there but grovelling vassals, and what hope had we ever to be independent, or to own even a house in which to die?
"I do not need to tell you of the difference here, of how the most of us have our own little homes, and count our friends among the best people in New Jedboro; and three-fourths of the aldermen in our council, and the trustees of our schools, and the elders of our kirks, are from the ranks of honest labour.
"Let us thank God we have escaped from the class tyranny and the peasant bondage of the land beyond the seas."
A new and different light was now upon the rapt faces of the men--and the end of it all was that they turned the diamond-ringed gentlemen from their doors.
Nor was this the last of Angus's eloquence. A few days later the manufacturers, being met in conclave at Mr. Blake's office, sent for the young Scotsman and personally thanked him for his good offices in settling the strike. Both sorts were there--the kind and the unkind, the gentleman and the churl--but all alike united in grateful praise for the mediation which Angus had accomplished. Many unctuous things were said, but when one tyrant arose to speak his gratitude, Angus's face bore a look which boded ill.
"We're glad," said Mr. M'Dougall, swelling with vulgar pompousness, "to see that you recognize the rights of property and the claims of vested interests. And we trust," he added, "that Labour has learned a lesson it will not soon forget." Then he sat down with the majesty of a balloon descending.