“I shouldn’t like anybody coming swaggering and hectoring into my office. I shouldn’t like Albert Clough and, perhaps you won’t mind my saying, I shouldn’t like Albert Cough’s employer.” Mr. Tomlinson waived away the suggestion impatiently and continued:— “Not merely saying you didn’t pay enough wage, demanding, when you told him you paid as much as you could see your way to pay, demanding in a truculent voice to see your ledgers and overhaul your pass-book, and wanting to know why you kept a carriage if you couldn’t afford better wages. D—n the man, he’ll be wanting to know what I have for dinner next, and what my wife gives for her bonnets and her gloves.” Edward smiled. He knew Albert Clough and Albert’s ways. But he was not the man to make admissions that might be useful to his adversary and of no use to himself. “Why, Tomlinson,” he said, “if it comes to that I’ve over a thousand men coming every day of the week into my office, not exactly hectoring and blustering, but in a manner that is more effective, though quieter, than any hectoring and blustering, and these thousand men and more dictate to me every hour of my life, not what I shall pay my clerks, but, what is more comprehensive still, what I shall sell my goods for, in other words, what I shall charge for every act of my business life; I can’t give a piece of advice, I can’t open my mouth in the court, I can’t write a business letter, I can’t take a business journey, I can’t prepare a will, an agreement, or a deed, but these impertinent thousand odd men, meaning thereby my lords and gentlemen of the British Parliament, tell me exactly what I may charge and what I may not. And yet, you see, I contrive to live and look pleasant.” “Oh! that’s special pleading, and you know it. There’s no parallel in the two cases.” “Pardon me, the cases are exactly parallel. The State intervenes between me and my client because it knows it would be a sad day for the client if he were left to the tender mercies of the lawyer, or, as you would put it, to the law of supply and demand on which you employers claim to rest the rate of wages. Now the workman has nothing to help him against you but this very right of combination and the clumsy, often futile, boomerang-like device of a strike. A poor weapon, but better than none at all. And yet he is to be deprived even of that.” “But you’re ruining us, man; you’re driving the trade out of the district and God only knows when and whether it will ever come back again.”