"Failing that, the other reasonable course is conciliation. I would suggest approaching Hampden and Salt to find out whether they are open to consider a compromise. The details would naturally require careful handling, but if both sides were willing to come to an understanding, a basis could be found. As things are, I should consider it a gain to drop the Personal Property Tax, the Minimum Wage Bill, to guarantee the inviolability of capital against further taxation while we are in office, and to make generous concessions for the fuller representation of the monied classes in Parliament, in return for the abandonment of a coal war, the dispersal in some agreed way of the League reserves, the reduction of the subscription to a nominal sum, and a frank undertaking that the League would not adopt a hostile policy while the agreement remained in force." This proposal was even less to the temper of the meeting than the former one had been, and the latter half of it was scarcely heard among the fusillade of hostile cries. No one laughed when a hot-headed comrade stood upon a chair and howled "Traitor!" Tirrel looked round on the assembly. Practically every man who had a tacit right to join in the deliberative Council had arrived, and the room was full; but there was not a single member among them willing to face the necessity for strong and immediate action, and they were hostile to the man who just touched the secret depths of their unconfessed and innermost misgivings. Mr Tubes felt that he had done his duty, and need not invite reference to his delicate position by further emphasising unpalatable truths; he had presented the spectacle of a weak man startled into boldness, now he was sufficiently himself again to go with the majority. The more responsible members of the Government distrusted Tirrel in every phase; the smaller fry relied on the wisdom of orthodoxy, and agreed that the man who could blow the hotness of extirpation and the coldness of conciliation with the same breath must prove an unworthy guide; and on every hand there was the tendency of settled authority to deprecate novel and unmatured proceedings. Tirrel had become the Hampden of an earlier decade among his party. "You call me 'Traitor,'" he said, turning to the man who had done so. "Write down the word, comrade, and then, if you will bring it to me without a blush six months hence, I will wear it round my neck in penance." He bowed to the Premier and withdrew, not in anger or with a mean sense of injustice, but because he felt that it would be sheer mockery to share the deliberations of a Council when their respective views, on a matter which he believed to be the very crux of their existence, were antagonistic in their essences. After his departure the progress was amazing. His ill-considered proposals had cleared the air. Every one knew exactly what he did not want, and that was a material step towards arriving at the opposite goal.