"And now, gentlemen," continued Hathaway. "Let me plead for a better spirit. That great mass of human beings you coldly call Labour fought for England just as I fought for England, just as thousands and thousands of our own class fought. We've been together in the trenches year in year out and we've learnt to know each other, not as hostile abstractions, but as living men,--good men, the most of us. We learnt all sorts of things we didn't realize before the war, but most of all we learnt--and when I say we, _I mean your sons as well_--that we're all Englishmen and that we all have to play the game and stick together--officer and man. D'you think I who have watched over the comfort of my men, taught them, led them into danger and seen them unafraid, who have hungered with them, thirsted with them, gloried in them for these last long years--d'you think I can coldly condemn those men and their wives and children to starvation now? D'you think I can treat them as an enemy? I can't. And the men who have been proud of us, their officers,--d'you think they haven't learnt the value of leadership? They have--but not the leadership of a slave-master. In the long bitter years of strife those men have won for themselves a freedom of soul which is the life-force of a free Empire! Class-hatred! It has vanished as between officer and man. We're all Englishmen together--and we're going to work, share and share alike, in the new England, that, share and share alike, we fought for!" He flung open the door behind him. "Here, gentlemen, is Jim Swain, the leader of your work-people in their time of trouble. He saved my life twice--once in the trenches and got a D.C.M. when he ought to have had the V.C.--and again to-day when he set a seal of comradeship between the managing director and the employees of Hathaway's. Together, he and I, and those we represent, are going to make our patch of England worth the lives that were spent to save it!" There was a hush in the room, and into that hush came the strains of a military band playing a regiment to the neighbouring railway station. It played the familiar marching tune of the old days, and a flaw of wind brought masculine voices in the uplift of the chorus. "... There's a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark cloud inside out, For the boys are home!" "They're coming back!" cried Captain Hathaway. "Coming back in their thousands and their millions--officers and men--your sons at the head of the men they have learned to love! Comrades that can never be estranged! We're the new generation, gentlemen--the old order has gone--never to return--we've come back, Swain and I, from the borders of death that has taught us how precious life may be."