Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
Mr. Wilkinson, the Labour Member, had been to all intents and purposes
asked not to fondle the twins. He was a tall spare man with a great bush
of pepper-and-salt hair, a Yorkshire accent, and an eye that hardly
rested on any single object long enough to get more than a fleeting
visual impression of it. He wrote on the first and third weeks of the
month the "Novum's" column of "Military Notes," and on the alternate
weeks filled the same column with officially inspired "Trade Union
Echoes." Between these two activities of Mr. Wilkinson's there was a
connexion. He, in common with everybody else at The Witan, was loud in
decrying the jobberies and vested interests of Departments, with the War
Office placed foremost in the shock of his wrath. But the Trade Unions
were another matter, and never a billet-creating measure came before
Parliament but he strove vehemently to have its wheels cogged in with
those of the existing Trade Union machine. That is to say, that while in
theory he was for democratic competitive examination, in practice he
found something to be said for jobbery, could the fitting Trade Unionist
but be found. He was, moreover, a firebrand by temperament, and this is
where the connexion between the "Military Matters" and the "Echoes"
appears. Trade Unionists he declared, ought to learn to shoot. The other
side, with their cant about "Law and Order," never hesitated to call out
the regular troops; therefore, until the Army itself should have been
won over by means of the leaflets that were disseminated for the
purpose, they ought in the event of a strike to be prepared to throw up
barricades, to shoot from cellar-windows, and to throw down
chimney-stacks from the housetops. Capitalist-employed troops would not
destroy more property than they need; in a crooked-streeted town the
advantage of long-range fire would be gone; and Mr. Wilkinson was
prepared to demonstrate that a town defended on his lines could hold
out, in the event of Industrial War pushed to an extreme, until it was
starved into surrender.--These arguments, by the way, had impressed Mr.
Prang profoundly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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