I have often thought that Walter Crane’s cartoon, “The Triumph of Labour,” has a deep esoteric meaning, though perhaps not intended by its author. Every socialist knows the picture--a May-day procession, in which a number of working-folk are riding to the festival in a large wain, with a brave flutter of flags and banners, and supporting above them, with upturned palms, a ponderous-looking globe on which is inscribed “The Solidarity of Labour”--the whole party being drawn by two sturdy Oxen, the true heroes of the scene, who must be wishing the solidarity of labour were a little less solid, for it would appear that those heedless merry-makers ought to be prosecuted for overloading their faithful friends. The Triumph of Labour seems a fit title for the scene, but in a sense which democrats would do well to lay to heart. Do not horses and other “beasts of burden” deserve their share of citizenship? Centuries hence, perhaps, some learned antiquarian will reconstruct, from such anatomical data as may be procurable, the gaunt, misshapen, pitiable figure of our now vanishing cab-horse, and a more civilized posterity will shudder at the sight of what we still regard as a legitimate agent in locomotion. Such, then, was the position of our Forlorn Hope in the years that saw the menace of Armageddon looming larger. Like every one else, humanitarians underrated the vastness of the catastrophe towards which the world was drifting; but some at least saw the madness of the scaremongers who were persistently fostering in their respective nations the spirit of hatred; and five years before the crash came it was pointed out in the _Humanitarian_ that a terrible war was, consciously or unconsciously, the aim and end of the outcry that was being raised about the wicked designs of Germany, to the concealment of the more important fact that every nation’s worst enemies are the quarrelsome or interested persons within its own borders, who would involve two naturally friendly peoples in a foolish and fratricidal strife. We knew too well, from the lessons of the Boer War, what sort of folk some of these were, who, themselves without the least intention of fighting, had stirred up such warlike passions in the Yellow Press. I had been acquainted with some of them at that time, and had not forgotten how, meeting one such firebrand, I noticed with surprise that he had become facially, as well as journalistically, yellow, his cheeks having assumed an ochreous hue since I had seen him a day or two before. He confided his secret to me. He had once enlisted in the army; and having, as he supposed, been discharged, was now stupefied by receiving a notice to rejoin his regiment. And there he sat, wondering how he could meet his country’s call, a yellow journalist indeed: I saw him in his true colours that day.