“If you would only see my uncle and argue it out! He, I am sure, would succeed where I,” with a sigh, “where I so horribly fail.” “Look here,” said Erb, hastily, “if it’s any satisfaction to you, I’ll say at once that I’m with the movement, heart, body, and soul.” Lady Frances took his big hand and patted it thankfully. “Can’t tell you how pleased I am,” she declared. “I’ll send on all the circulars and figures and things when I reach Eaton Square to-night—(Children, children, you are tiresome, really)—and then you can start work directly, can’t you?” A busy man always has time to spare; it is only your lazy person who can never place a minute at anyone’s disposal. Thus it was that Erb tacked on to his other duties, the work of making known the Society for Anglicising Foreign Manufactures, pressing into the service all the young orators of his acquaintance, and furnishing them with short and easy arguments. Our import trade was so many millions in excess of our outgoing trade: why should this be so? Our villages were becoming deserted, and country manufactories dwindled day by day: this must be stopped. Vague talk about technical education; praise for the English working man, and adulation of his extraordinary, but sometimes dormant brain power; necessity of providing tasks for the rising generation that they might not push men of forty out of berths. An agreeable programme, one that could be promulgated without those submissive inquiries addressed to the labour leaders in the House, which always had a suggestion of servility. Erb, the following Sunday, spoke at Southwark Park in the morning, at Peckham Rye in the afternoon, and Deptford Broadway in the evening, and, the subject being new, he found himself invited to address several working men’s clubs during the week. Paragraphs, slipped into the newspapers, sometimes contained his name: Lady Frances wrote that her uncle was delighted, and had asked to be especially remembered. A later note mentioned that it was intended to hold a mass meeting at St. James’s Hall, to bring the subject well before the people of London: her uncle would not be able to be present, but he had begged her to request Mr. Barnes to speak on this occasion: there would be a Duchess of philanthropic tendencies in the chair, and several members of Parliament had promised to speak. “Don’t disappoint us!” said the postscript appealingly. Erb sent an agreeable postcard in reply, and a friend of his, an assistant-librarian in the Free Library, promised to devote himself to work of research and ascertain how one addressed a lady of such distinguished rank as the wife of a Duke. The assistant-librarian urged that evening-dress was the correct thing, and offered to lend a suit which he and his brother wore when they went out into society, patronising dances at the Surrey Masonic Hall but here Erb’s commonsense interfered. The meeting was advertised in the daily