Asked what he did towards that end, Spanton said that at the moment he was delivering a series of lectures at such boys' schools as permitted treason to be talked. They were addresses on Socialism; not pure Socialism, but a brand of his own. "Because, of course," he said, "we must get hold of the younger generation. The middle-aged and the elderly are no good; young men, youths, and boys are the best material. I show them as vividly as I can how dependent all of them are on labour not only for their comfort, but for the necessities of life. I have slides illustrating all the chief industries and some of the minor ones, even to cricket-bat making. I take them down coal-mines and show them what kind of a life a miner has to lead before our eggs and bacon can be cooked. I draw comparisons between their own pocket-money and the earnings of many kinds of labourers. In short I do all I can to make them think vividly of what the underworld of toil is like, and to realize how the spectacle of the upper world of wealth, as reflected in the halfpenny papers, must strike the toiler. If once they can be brought to understand this--to put themselves in the place of those others--things will be easier. Because it is a realization which they will never forget. I don't draw any moral. I don't suggest that there shall be an equal division of property or anything like that. For one thing, the schoolmasters wouldn't let me, and for another, I don't believe in equality. But I do drop a hint now and then that cricket and football are not all, and that the possession of riches carries with it a responsibility to the State." "I should guess," I said, "that not the least of your difficulties in preparing your addresses is softening the adjectives. You must want to say so much more than you dare." "O Heavens, yes!" he replied fervently. "I have the very deuce of a time with the blue pencil. And there are other troubles too. Some little while ago, for example, I was just rabid about a freak dinner that had been given in one of the big London restaurants, where some dancing girl was throned on a solid bank of roses that cost eight hundred pounds, and the musicians were seated in a barca that glided about a lake made for that evening only. There was a strike on at the time, and the contrast between this lavish rotten luxury on the one side and the destitution of the strikers' wives and children on the other was too extreme. In the old days when the poor couldn't read, or papers were too expensive, such dinners had a chance of being missed; but to-day everything is made public and reaches even the poorest, and helps very properly to inflame them. That is one of the principal reasons why nothing is ever going to be the same any more.