"Now, listen," Mr. Foley continued. "I will show you the other way. I will look with you into the future. I cannot agree with all your views but I, too, would like to see the diminution of capital from the hands of the manufacturers and the middle classes, and an increase of prosperity to the operatives. I would like to see the gulf between them narrowed year by year. I would like to see the working man everywhere established in quarters where life is wholesome and pleasant. I would like to see his schools better, even, than they are at present. I would like to see him, in the years to come, a stronger, a more capable, a more dignified unit of the Empire. He can only be made so by prosperity. Therefore, I wish for him prosperity. You want to sow the country red with ruin and fire, and there isn't any man breathing, not even you, can tell exactly what the outcome of it all might be. I want to work at the same thing more gently. Last year for the first time, I passed a Bill in Parliament which interfered between the relations of master and man. In a certain trade dispute I compelled the employers, by Act of Parliament, to agree to a vital principle upon which the men insisted. The night I drove home from the House I said to Lady Elisabeth, my niece, that that measure, small though it was, marked a new era in the social conditions of the country. It did. What I have commenced, I am prepared to go on with. I am prepared by every logical and honest means to legislate for labour. I am prepared to legislate in such a way that the prosperity of the manufacturer, all the manufacturers in this country, must be shared by the workpeople. I am prepared to fight, tooth and nail, against twenty per cent dividends on capital and twenty-five shillings a week wages for the operative. There are others in the Cabinet of my point of view. In a couple of years we must go to the country. I am going to the country to ask for a people's government. Go to Manchester, if you must, but talk common sense to the people. Let them strike where they are subject to wrongs, and I promise you that I am on their side, and every pressure that my Government can bring to bear upon the employers, shall be used in their favour. You shall win--you as the champion of the men, shall win all along the line. You shall improve the conditions of every one of those industries in the north. But--it must be done legitimately and without sinister complications. I know what is in your mind, Mr. Maraton, quite well. I know your proposal. It is in your mind to have the railway strike, the coal strike, the ironfounders' strike, and the strike of the Lancashire operatives, all take place on the same day. You intend to lay the country pulseless and motionless. You won't accept terms. You court disaster--disaster which you refer to as an operation. Don't do it. Try my way. I offer you certain success. I offer you my alliance, a seat in Parliament at once, a place in my Government in two years' time.