“Yes, he would,” answered Trood. “There’s nothing in the world, even as it’s run now, to stop brains. There’s boys who were charity school boys thirty years ago that the world listens to very respectfully to-day. But Kellock’s let a lot of class hatred come into his talk, and hatred breeds hatred. Never a man wanted power more than him, but his sort go the wrong way to work with their bluster and threats. They don’t help: they’re out for blood. We’re a very fair country at heart and under our constitution we’ve grown to be the finest people on earth. So, naturally, as a whole, the nation don’t want the Constitution swept away till we can get a better. The socialists have no traditions, and don’t agree among themselves yet, and I for one wouldn’t trust people that scoff at tradition and want to be a law to themselves. They would be a great danger, Henry, and if we got all to pieces like that and in sight of civil wars and revolution, we should throw ourselves open to attack from our enemies. Then, while we were wrangling how to govern ourselves, we’d damn soon find England was going to be governed by somebody else.” “There’s plenty of hungry eyes on the British Empire no doubt,” allowed Mr. Barefoot. “Plenty; and if our army and navy got bitten with this stuff, it would be good-bye to everything. And that wouldn’t suit Kellock’s friends.” “And be it as it will,” said Daisy Finch, “a paper mill isn’t a charity. Those that run the Mill have got to live, I suppose.” “Yes, Daisy,” admitted Trood; “but we must be fair to this Kellock, though I’m far from supporting what he says. The ills are as he stated them; the remedies are not as he stated ’em. He argues that the workman’s work should no more be his whole life than work is his master’s whole life. Because Capital buys a man’s working hours, it doesn’t buy his life and liberties. Outside his work, he’s as much right to enjoy being alive as his employer. A machine looks very different from the owner’s point of view and the worker’s. The owner’s the master of the machine; the worker is its slave; and it’s on the worker the machine puts the strain, not on the owner. So we have got to consider our working hours in relation to our lives as a whole, and balance work against life, and consider how our labour affects our existence. A six hour day at a machine may be a far greater tax on a man or woman than an eight hour day at the desk, or the plough. You’ve got to think of the nervous energy, which ain’t unlimited.”