"Tell them this," struck in Mr Bilch, "they'll understand it better.

Tell them that the _Intrepidy_ could sail round and round the Channel Fleet and b.l.o.o.d.y well throw her sh.e.l.ls over the moon and down on to their decks without ever once coming into range. Tell them that."

"The picture so graphically drawn by Comrade Bilch is substantially correct," corroborated Sir Causter Kerr. "The _Intrepide_, together with three other battleships of her cla.s.s, has an effective range of between four and five thousand yards more than that of any English ship.... But you have been told all this so often, comrades, that I fear it cannot interest you." Sir Causter was having his revenge for two years of subservience at a thousand pounds a year.

"Then perhaps you will tell us, as First Lord of the Admiralty--the job you are paid for doing--what you imagine the navy is kept up for?"

demanded a comrade with fierce resentment.

"As far as I have been encouraged to believe, in that capacity," replied Kerr with easy insolence, "I imagine that its duties consist nowadays in patrolling the lobster-pots, and in amusing the visitors on the various seaside promenades by turning the searchlights on."

"We won't ask you to remain any longer," said the Premier.

Sir Causter Kerr rose leisurely. "Good morning, comrades," he remarked punctiliously, and going home wrote out his resignation, "from motives of patriotism," and sent a copy of the letter to all the papers.

A man who had been standing by the door listening to the conversation now came forward with a copy of an early special edition of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in his hand.

"You needn't sweat yourselves about being equal to a single power or not," he remarked with an unpleasant laugh. "Look at the 'fudge' there."

And he threw the paper on the table, as though he washed his hands of it and many other things.

Mr Bilch secured it, and turning to the s.p.a.ce which is left blank for the inclusion of news received up to the very moment of going to press, he read aloud the single item it contained.

COAL WAR

BERLIN, _Thursday Morning_.

"The action which France is reported to have taken had for some time been antic.i.p.ated here. On all sides there is the opinion, amounting to conviction, that Germany must at once call into operation the power lying dormant in the Penalising Tariff and impose a tax on imported coal. It is agreed that otherwise, in her frantic endeavours to restore the balance of her export trade, England would flood this country with cheap coal and precipitate a state of things similar to that from which France is just emerging.

"Emphasis is laid on the fact that such a measure will be self-protective and in no way aggressive. It is not antic.i.p.ated that the tax will exceed 2 mks. 50 pf., or at the most 3 mks.

per ton."

"Export value, eight and elevenpence," murmured a late arrival, one of the fifty practical men in the House. "Yes, I imagine that two marks fifty will just about knock the bottom out."

"Is there nothing we can offer them in exchange?" demanded some one.

"Nothing we can hit them back with?"

Cecil Brown, who was suspected of heterodoxy on this one point, crystallised the tariff question into three words.

"Nothing but tears," he replied.

"If there's one thing that fairly makes me hot it's the way we always have to wait for some one else to tell us what's going on," said the comrade who had brought in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, looking across at the Foreign Office Under-Secretary resentfully. "A fellow in Holborn here pokes the paper under my nose and asks me what we're going to do about it, and there I don't even know what is being done at us. What I want to know is, what our amba.s.sadors and Foreign Office think they're there for. It's always the same, and then there'll be the questions in Parliament, and we know nothing. Makes us look like a set of kiddin'

amateurs."

The fact had been noticed. Former governments had not infrequently earned the t.i.tle in one or two departments. Later governments had qualified for it in every department. The reason lay on the surface; the members of those parliaments and the men who sent them were themselves bunglers and amateurs in their daily work and life. Except in the stereotyped product of machinery, accuracy was scarcely known. The man who had built a house in England at that period, the man who had had a rabbit-hutch built to order, the man who had stipulated for one article to be made _exactly_ like a copy, the man who had been so unfortunate as to require "the plumbers in," the man who had to do with labour in any shape or form, the man who had been "faithfully" promised delivery or completion by a certain stated time, the woman who shopped, the person who merely existed with open eyes, could all testify out of experiences, some heartrending, some annoying, some simply amusing, that precision and reliability scarcely existed among the lower grades of industry and commerce. It was a period of transition. The worker had cast off the love, the delicacy, the intelligence of the craftsman, and he had not yet attained to the unvarying skill of the automaton. In another century one man would only be able to fix throttle valve connections on to hot-water pipes, but his fixing of throttle valves would be a thing to dream about, while the initial letter A's of his brother, whose whole life would be devoted to engraving initial letter A's on bra.s.s dog-collar plates, would be as near unswerving perfection as mundane initials ever could be.

"Makes us look like a set of tinkerin' amateurs."

"One inference is plain enough," said Mr Guppling, smoothing over the suggestion. "These three things weren't going to happen all together of their own accord. There's a deep game somewhere, and seeing what's at stake our powers ought to be wide enough for us to put our hands on them and stop it."

There was a murmur of approval. Having been taken by surprise, the idea of peremptorily "stopping it" was a peculiarly attractive one.

But there were malcontents who were not to be appeased so easily, and a Comrade Pennefarthing, who had arrived in the meantime, raised an old cry in a new form.

"I won't exactly say that we've been betrayed," he declared, glancing at the group of orthodox Ministers who sat together, "but game or no game I will say that we've been d.a.m.ned badly served with information."

Comrade Tirrel stood up. He had not yet spoken at all, and he was accorded instant silence, for men were beginning to look to him. "It is now nearly eleven o'clock," he said in his quick, incisive tone, "and some of us have been here for upwards of an hour. We met to consider a situation. That situation still remains. May I ask that the Home Secretary, who is doubly qualified for the task, should tell us the extent of the danger and its probable effect?"

If Mr Tubes possessed a double qualification he also laboured under a corresponding disability. As the representative of a mining const.i.tuency, a practical expert, and a leading member of a Government which existed by the goodwill of the workers--largely of the miners--it would be scarcely to his interest to minimise the gathering cloud. As the Minister for the Home Department, the blacker he made the picture the greater the volume of obloquy he drew upon his head for not having foreseen the danger; the more relief he asked for, the fiercer the opposition he would encounter from hostile sections and from the perturbed heads of a depleted Treasury.

"We are still very much in the dark as to what has really happened, is happening, and will happen," he remarked tamely. "An appreciable drop in the demand for coal, whether for home or export, will certainly have a disturbing effect on the conditions of labour in many departments. But the difficulties of estimating the effects are so great----"

There were murmurs. Whatever might be the failings of Socialistic oratory, flatness and excess of moderation did not lie among them.

"Figures," suggested Tirrel pointedly.

"Perhaps Comrade Tirrel will take the job in hand instead of me," said Tubes bitterly, but without any show of anger. "Doubtless he'd get a better hearing."

"No," replied Tirrel gravely, "the moment is too critical for recrimination. If the Home Secretary lays the position frankly before us, he will have no cause to complain of an unsympathetic hearing, nor, as far as I can speak, of a whole-hearted support in taking means to safeguard it."

It occurred to Mr Tubes then, for the first time in his life--and it was almost like a shock to feel it--that the man who had always seemed to throw himself into sharp antagonism to himself might be actuated by higher motives than personal jealousy after all. He continued his speech.

"If we accept the figure of five millions as a correct return of the Unity League membership, and if we a.s.sume that they will all obey the boycott, then we are face to face with the fact that on the basis of a four ton per person average, twenty million tons of coal must be written off the home consumption."

"But the four tons per head average includes the entire industrial consumption of the country," objected Mr Vossit.

"That is so," admitted Mr Tubes, "but it also includes a great many people whose use of coal is practically _nil_. An alternative basis is to a.s.sume that two millions of the members are house-holders. Then taking ten tons a year as their average household consumption--and admitting that all the wealthiest men in the country are included the average is not too high--we arrive at just the same result.

"The exports, on the other hand, do not depend on estimate: we have the actual returns. France takes fifteen million tons in round numbers. For the purpose of facing the worst, we may therefore a.s.sume that the work of digging and handling thirty-five million tons will be suddenly cut off."

"Germany," some one reminded him.

"Germany is wholly conjectural at present. I have no objection to taking it into account as well, if it is thought desirable, but I would point out that we are being influenced by the merest rumour."

"No," objected Tirrel, but without any enmity, "I think that we must regard Germany as lost. We are just beginning to touch the outskirts of a vast organisation which has been quietly perfecting its plan of operation for years. I do not regard a German tax as settled because of this one rumour, but I do regard it as settled because at this precise moment the rumour has been allowed to appear."

"Germany ten millions," accepted Mr Tubes. "Total decrease, forty-five million tons."

"Don't you be too sure of that, comrade," warned Mr Bilch. "Why, it's not twelve o'clock yet by a long way. There'll be half a dozen editions out before the 'Three o'clock winners.'" Mr Bilch evidently regarded his shaft that each fresh edition might contain a new country imposing a tax humorously, but several comrades looked towards the Home Secretary enquiringly.

"The other large importers are Italy, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, Spain and Denmark," said Mr Tubes, who could have talked coal statistics for hours if necessary. "All these, with the possible exception of Russia, _must_ import. It is unlikely that the estimate I have given will be exceeded from that cause."

"And the result?"

"Above and below, about a million men are now employed in raising 236,000,000 tons. It is simple arithmetic.... In less than a month about two hundred thousand more men will be out of work."

Mr Chadwing, Chancellor of the Exchequer, moved uneasily in his chair.

"That is the full extent?" enquired Cecil Brown.

"No," admitted the Home Secretary. "That is the inevitable direct result. Forty-five million tons less will be carried by rail, or cart, or ship, or all three. A fair sprinkling of railway-men, carters, dockers, stokers, sailors, and other fellows will be dropped off too.