At other gatherings Socialists held forth under the red flag. “That banner, comrades, which ’as braved a ’undred fights, and the mere sight of which makes the Capitalistic bloodsucker tremble as he feels the time approach when Lybor shall come into its inheritance and the Proletariat shyke off its chaine and join ’ands all the world over, despizin’ ryce and creed and all the artificial obstructions that a designin’ Priest-’ood and a blood-stained Plutocracy ’ave placed between them to distract their attention from the great cause of Socialism, the great cause that mykes us comrades . . . ’ere, keep off my ’oof, you blighter, with your ammunition wagons. . . .” Religionists of various sects, all with long hair and dressed in shabby black, the Book either before them on a campaigning lectern or tucked beneath one arm, called upon Christian men to dip their hands into the precious blood and drink from the eternal fountain of pure water that is to be found in the Apocalypse. “Come to ’Im, come to ’Im, I say, my friends, come straight; oh, it is joyful to belong to Jesus. Don’t stop for anything, come to ’Im now like little children. . . . Let us sing a ’ymn. You know it, most of you; but brother ’ere,” and as he spoke he turned towards a pale-faced youth who held a bag to take the offertory, that sacrament that makes the whole world kin, “will lead it for you.” The acolyte cleared his throat raucously, and to a popular air struck up the refrain of “Let us jump joyful on the road.” Flat-breasted girls and pale-faced boys took up the strain, and as it floated through the heavy air, reverberating from the pile of public buildings, gradually all the crowd joined in; shyly at first and then whole-heartedly, and by degrees the vulgar tune and doggerel verses took on an air of power and dignity, and when the hymn was finished, the tears stood in the eyes of grimy-looking women and of red-faced men. Then, with his bag, the pale-faced hymn-leader went through the crowd, reaping a plenteous harvest, all in copper, from those whose hearts had felt, but for a moment, the full force of sympathy. Suffragist ladies discussed upon “the Question,” shocking their hearers as they touched on prostitution and divorce, and making even stolid policemen, who stood sweating in their thick blue uniforms, turn their eyes upon the ground. After them, Suffragette girls bounded upon the cart, consigning fathers, brothers, and the whole male section of mankind straight to perdition as they held forth upon the Vote, that all-heal of the female politician, who thinks by means of it to wipe out all those disabilities imposed upon her by an unreasonable Nature and a male Deity, who must have worked alone up in the Empyrean without the humanising influence of a wife.