"Well, anyhow, I found something to say about this, and said it with a certain amount of unambiguity. And what happened? The schoolmaster seemed at the time quite satisfied, but I received a letter from him later asking me not to come again. It appears, as I afterwards found out, that one of the givers of the feast was a notoriously rich Jew whose son was at the school. The son wrote home about it and the father threatened to take him away if any more such lectures were delivered. So there you are! "But what I really want to see in force more than anything else," Spanton went on, "and these lectures of mine are really a kind of gentle preamble to the campaign, is compulsory manual labour for everybody. A kind of pacific conscription. Ruskin, you remember, set his undergraduates to make a road. They did it perhaps rather too much as a lark and not steadily or sweatily enough. I would catch the boys earlier and put them for one or two years to mining, building, engineering, digging, whatever it is, at the time when they would naturally be at the Universities or just entering office. That would enlarge their sympathies and give them the practical insight which is the next best thing to imagination. But the time for such a scheme is not yet." "It seems to me," I said, "that your scheme might go farther with enormously beneficial results. If to know all is to understand all, a system of interchange of employment and positions, carried out fully, would get into every section of society an understanding of the others. If the lady took a turn in the kitchen she would understand her cook's difficulties, while the cook in the dining-room would know for the first time what it felt like when the dishes were cold, underdone, or late. A bond would thus grow. Again, if the impatient patron of the restaurant had to take the waiter's napkin for a while, he would learn not only the reason of delay, but what it feels like to be spoken to like dirt, and the waiter, if he came in equally hungry and pressed for time, would appreciate the provocation to be sarcastic and rasping. And so on, right through society, until we all knew." Spanton was pleased to say that my amendment was sensible; but it would not be very practicable, he thought. He has little humour, and no respect for it. "And meanwhile," I asked, "what trade have you learned?" He said he had learned none. He had been to Paris to learn painting; had given it up and become a convinced Socialist, and was now devoting himself to propaganda. "But surely," I said, "it would be well, if only to strengthen your case, to put the plan into execution yourself. You are so young and you lay yourself open to the charge of inconsistency."