He was. He felt immense. He felt that he was carrying his audience with him. The sound of his own voice excited him and whipped him on. It was a sort of intoxication. He was soaring now, up and up, into his peroration. "It is a gratification to me to see so many working men and women here to-night. They are specially welcome. We want to have them with us. Do not distrust the working man. The working man is sound at heart. Sound at head too, when he is let alone and not carried away by the treacherous arguments of ignorant agitators. We--myself and the founders of this League--have not that bad opinion of the working man which his leaders--his misleaders, I may call them--appear to have. We believe in him, we know that, if he were only let alone, there is no section of the community that would stand more solid for order and good government than he." "Hear! Hear!" from Colonel Grainger. Ralph whispered, "Camouflage!" to Horace, who nodded. "There is nothing in the aims of this League contrary to the interests of Labour. On the contrary"--he heard, as if somebody else had perpetrated it, the horrible repetition--"I mean to say--" His brain fought for another phrase madly and in vain. "On the contrary, it exists in order to safeguard the true interests, the best interests, of every working man and woman in the country." "Hear! Hear!" from Sir John Corbett. Mr. Waddington smiled. "President Wilson"--he became agitated and drank water--"President Wilson talked about making the world safe for democracy. Well, if we, you and I, all of us, don't take care, the world won't be safe for anything else. It certainly won't be safe for the middle classes, for the great business and professional classes, for the class to which I, for one, belong: the class of English gentlemen. It won't be safe for _us_. "Not that I propose to make a class question of it. To make a class question of it would be more than wrong. It would be foolish. It would be a challenge to revolution, the first step towards letting loose, unchaining against us, those forces of disorder and destruction which we are seeking to keep down. I am not here to insist on class differences, to foment class hatred. Those differences exist, they always will exist; but they are immaterial to our big purpose. This is a question of principle, the great principle of British liberty. Are we going to submit to the tyranny of one class over all other classes, of one interest over all other interests in the country? Are we going to knock under, I say, to a minority, whether it is a Labour minority or any other?