The old man, a-quaver in voice and body, doddered forward, touching his hat. Undersized and shrunken through starvation during infancy, and brutal usage throughout his growing years, he was an example of the great principle we Christians have enforced and maintained throughout the centuries: that the world's hardest work should be done by the weakest. Tip, as he was called, had been a coal-porter till at fifty-five he dislocated his shoulder shifting loads too heavy for him. Thereafter he was partially disabled, a casualty of the Industrial War, and to be treated as such. "Would you give us a week's money or notice, sir?" he said now in his shaking voice. "Did I take you on by the week?" asked Alf ferociously. "No, sir; by the day." "Then what ye talking about?--Ain't I paid you up?" "You paid us up, sir. Only we got to live." "Very well then. There's the House at the top of the hill for such as you. Ain't that good enough? This is a Christian country, this is." Alf was half-way up the steps to his office, and he pointed in the direction of the Work-house. A curious tawny glow lit the old man's eyes. His lips closed over his gums. "Bloody Bastille," he muttered. Alf heard him and ran down the steps. He was still with the stillness of the born bully. "None of that now," he said quietly. "No filthy language in my yard! And no loiterin eether!--Off you go or I send for the police. The country's got something better to think of than you and your likes, I reckon, just now." He stood in the gate of the yard with the cold domineering air of the warder in charge of convicts. The cleaners shambled away like a herd of mangy donkeys past work and turned out on waste land to die at their leisure. They were broken men all, old and infirm, drawn from the dregs of that Reserve of Labour on which the capitalist system has been built. They belonged to no Union; they were incapable of organisation and therefore of defence against the predatory class ... "We got no bloody country, men like us ain't." "Nor no bloody Christ." "The rich got Him too." "Same as they got everythink else" ... The last of them gone, Alf skipped up the steps into his office. He was not afraid of them, was not even depressed by their uncalled-for consideration of themselves. Indeed he was extraordinarily uplifted. His great scheme had, it is true, been brought low--through no omission on his part; but he had got out with a squeeze after a dreadful period of panic fury, and now experienced the lyrical exhilaration of the man who has escaped by his own exertions from sudden unexpected death.