“My friends, we must think for ourselves. We are not likely to have our thinking done for us to the best advantage. Now there are some plain, undeniable facts. They are the kind of facts which cannot be hid under a bushel basket, nor, for that matter, under a king’s crown. One of the most intelligible of these facts--and it is fundamental--is that the number of individual heads apportioned to the same number of paired legs make up the population, and units of population make nations, and nothing else can. An aggregate of gentlemen dressed in wigs, or holding truncheons sticking out of purple and gold-braided shawls never has, and, from sheer destitution, never could make a nation. By all the signs around us, and I am willing to accept them without any question, this country of ours is going to move; is about to begin housekeeping somewhere else, and I think it is an imperative necessity for the success of such a change that everyone living now on this island and calling himself an Englishman, must move also, and move to the same place (Hear, Hear,). But that moving is conditioned. It is indispensably necessary that we proclaim that condition, and insist upon its acceptance. We hold the situation in our own hands. We control the key to the future, to make or mar, or destroy the continuity of the English name. Why? Because if to-morrow the English workingman refused to follow the English flag to Australia, and took his wisdom, his tools and his savings somewhere else, that flag would lose twenty millions of subjects, and would wave over a remnant that could not ensure its protection or its support. (Hear, Hear). But the condition?” The speaker paused, sweeping his eyes over the sea of upturned faces, as if he was hunting through the chaotic assemblage for the disclosure of some particular visage which, either as an ally or an opponent, might receive the shock of his omnipotent secret. Whether he discovered the facial invitation or not, was not revealed in his subsequent action. He wheeled sideways to the stiffened line of men behind him--doubtless expectant and impatient numbers in the afternoon’s programme--and bringing his clenched right hand into the hollowed palm of his left hand, shouted, and not discordantly: “The condition is the abolition forever of the Law of Entail that to-day makes us a servile race.” Again he paused, as if so ponderous a statement, so fiercely declared, would elicit a demonstration--but to Leacraft’s abounding wonder, not a sound arose from the vast audience. Whether it was appalled, or thrilled, interested, or pleased, or dumbfounded, it gave no sign. Its immutable decree for the speaker to go on was its very silence. No public orator could conveniently, with respect to his own sensitive needs for public encouragement, stop there. But he had become cautious. He felt that perchance his auditors yet held mental reservations in favor of things as they were, as they wished them to continue.