“I say, with all my heart and soul,” he went on, “stay with the Flag, stay with the King, stay with our lords and ladies, but on one condition as freemen, to whose keeping now in this hour of peril they are wholly given. Into your hands the God of Nations entrusts their fate, but that fate can only be propitious as you are true to yourselves, your children, and your children’s children.” Then came the long delayed approval. A wave of excited pleasure brushed across the crowds, and the hand-clapping, begun in many separate centres, ran together, and with shouts of acquiescence, with cheers, with central and periphera, agitation, the huge aggregate expressed its tumultuous adhesion. Leacraft felt that the loyalty of these people was not impaired, and that the logic of events would still hold them united in a consentaneous allegiance at least, to the idea of the English nation, though it was pretty evident that the democratic claims of a wider opportunity for personal, for family promotion, leavened all their feelings, and that in the new regime it might be expected, that a great deal of the present relation of the classes would be swept away, and that the old time idolatry of degree, the mere flunkeyism of homage to name and geneological prestige, among the masses, had shrunken into nothingness. The stage was again occupied by a speaker, who was interested in very practical and urgent questions, the _how_ and _where_ and _when_, the disposition of the emigrants to the new country, and he revelled in plans, provisions, details of occupancy, and employment. He showed conclusively the power and effectiveness of organization, and the surprising accommodations that can be extracted from the most forlorn prospects by a shrewd use of forethought and combination. Funds had been scraped together, settlements, as yet in the dream stage of realization created, and a practical socialism consummated in the confederation of a large numbers in one common venture. This aspect of the emigration was dwelt upon by the speaker with some rigor. It was a surprise to Leacraft, and lent a strange expression to the still irreconcilable spectacle of Englishmen looking for a new home.