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The Review of Reviews. 



August I, 1906. 



In the midst of all this newly-discovered dream- 

 land of the Reals, George Leonard brings her the 

 great news of the victorj- of the part)- of progress 

 at the General Election, and after that to her the 



still gladder news of . But the reader must find 



that out for himself. 



A GREAT CONSPIRACY AND A VICTORY. 



I close this rapid sketch of a most interesting and 

 suggestive book with the following admirable de- 

 scription of what Mr. Whiteing calls the great con- 

 spiracy which culminated in the victory of the 

 Labour Party at the General Election. If it is a 

 little ideahsed, it will probably give some readers a 

 clearer idea than they have hitherto been able to 

 form of the spade-work which preceded the over- 

 throw of the Unionist Party last February : — 



" Yes." he said, '* the Great Conspiracy, one of those con- 

 spiracies formed in broad daj-light, and for everyone to 

 see and hear. These are the deadliest, and they've done 

 most of the bis things in the world. 



■ It was simply all the— I want a word for it — all the 

 men who had felt the pinch of the shoe, all over the coun. 

 try, laying- their heads together to do the trick for them- 

 selves, and waiting for nobody's leave. You remember 

 Vivian Grey's 'nothing is perra'itted: everything is done.' 



" 'The.v were of all the callings where the shoe pinches 

 most— factory lads, pit-boys and miners, navvies, carpenters, 

 shop hands, cobblers who had stuck to their last till they 

 were aick of the sorry return it made them in bread and 

 butter. And what they wanted was to have a say, as 

 experts, in the making of the laws they were called on to 

 obev. 



•' To find the best was the job. They were years at that 

 with their lanterns, not only in every market>place. but in the 

 polytechnics, institutes, lecture-rooms, and what not, where 

 their fellows were training themselves for their new part. 

 You've seen something of that. Miss Prue, I remember your 

 tellins me so. You've seen them making overtime in the 

 classes at the end of a day's work that would take the 

 pluck out of a horse. Toiling tor knowledge, hungering 

 and thirsting for it^it's no bad way. It makes you hold 

 on tight to your morsel. 



■'So. after awhile, still plot, plot, plotting, in the dead- 

 liest publicity, they had their band of nicked men— in 

 hricklavers with quite a turn for the mathematics of Mr. 

 Karl Marx counter-jumpers deep in .levons and Mill ; dust- 

 men, if von like, who knew their " Decline and Fall " far 

 otherwise than Mr. Silas Wegg: certainlv bargees whose 

 English was as pure as Addison's in both senses of the 

 ^OTd." ■ ^, ^ , 



"I know halt the men whose names are in those tele- 

 grams." said Prue. " I've met them in the classes." 



" Well, there they were ready to go anywhere and do 

 anything as soon as the hour of the election struck And. 

 with this, the constituencies mapped out tor invasion, as 

 England is said to be mapped out in the archives of the 



German staff, weighed, counted, tabulated, from top to 

 bottom, from side to side. The Primrose League work a 

 mere parlour game! For this was business: hardly a man 

 of them but had known what it was to tighten his belt on 

 an empty stomach as part of his lot in life." 



"I've been hungry, too," said Prue to herself. "Its just 

 capital exercise, biit I fancy you may carry it too far. ' 



"All this was mainly the work of two men. the Apostle 

 and the Organiser of Victory. The first had long been at 

 his post, the movement being a thing in the providence 

 of God He was a pitman of the hardy North—' Scotland 

 for ever' is still a good cry— who had thought it all out; 

 felt it, which is better, in the darkness and solitude of the 

 mine. Meditations are much more purposeful there than 

 among the tombs. He had risen from the pit to Parlia- 

 ment, but it was at first only a change of solitudes, tor, 

 through long vears. he was little more than a party of 

 one. "He was a Socialist, with the doctrine like a burning 

 fire within him. a fire that seemed to blaze through him 

 whenever you looked into his eyes. They were the eyes 

 of a dreamer for all that, hut of such dreams - i overty 

 misery, vice no longer the almost inevitable lot of countless 

 millions of women and men. He put them in that order, 

 tor, without being exactly a courtier, ' ladies first,' in all 

 ameliorative effort, is his rnle of life." 



"I've heard h,m speak scores of times." she said, and 

 I love him. Socrates must have been like that — so gentle, 

 so quiet, and strong." 



" Hardly, as to the fun, I should say. This one is as 

 incurably serious as if he had come back from the dead. 

 Perhaps" its the pit- I believe they won't tell half the 

 things they see and hear down there, not even to Boyal 

 Commissioners. . 



" The Organiser of Victory was at hand in a broti-er 

 Scot, a Highlander by race doubled with a Lowlander 

 in the outlook on life-the most formidable combination I 

 know. He was of peasant stock; he iiad been schooled by 

 the dominie of his village; and had. perhaps, ran barefoot 

 to his lessons. I know that his children run barefoot tor 

 health in their London home, and have the:r reward tor 

 it in looking the stoutest little cherubs ever caught out of 

 bounds. His next stage was ' Glasgie ' tor the humanities. 

 London for press work: finally a happy marriage with 

 one of the most refined and charming women of her time-- 

 Socialist as you all are. or may be made to be by pity and 

 love. . „ 



" He fashioned the band of conscripts into an army lor 

 the polls, drilled them, brigaded them for the field, financed 

 them too by treaties of mutual help with all the other 

 popular parties, who, from first to last, worked hand m 

 hand for the triumph of the common c,au-e H hut ;i 

 labour! Wliat endless journeys by day and by night to all 

 points of the compass, and the remotest in our isles— 

 sometimes further afield in special missions. Breaking here, 

 treaty-making there, and finally, when the hour came tor 

 the s"hock of battle, feeling th.it he conld await the issue 

 with a mind .at ease The rest you know, or will know m 

 all the glory of an achieved result, before the week le 

 out." 



" Ring in the New " is not an exciting romance cr 

 a novel of sensation. But it is a careful study of tht 

 movement of our times, and no one can read it 

 without getting a better grip upon the fundamentals. 



W. T. STEAD. 



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