"The last point," continued the spokesman, "is one that closely concerns the principles that we all profess. I refer to the obsolete and humiliating anachronism that with a Government pledged to the maintenance of social equality in office, at any hour of the day, at practically every railway station throughout the land you will still see trains subdivided as regards designation and accommodation into first, second, and third classes. It is a distinction which to us, as the representatives of the so-called third class, is nothing more or less than insulting. Why should me and my missis when we travel be compelled to sit where the accidents generally happen and have to put up with eighteen in a compartment, when smug clerks and saucy ladies' maids, who are no better than us, enjoy the comparative luxury of only fifteen in a compartment away from the collisions, and snide financiers and questionable duchesses, who are certainly a good deal worse, sit in padded rooms, well protected front and rear, and never know what it is to be packed more than six a-side? If that isn't class distinction I should like to know what is. It isn't--Gawd help us!--that we wish to mix with these people, or that we envy their position or covet their wealth. Such motives have never entered into the calculations of those who have been foremost in Socialistic propaganda. But as thoughtful and self-respecting units of an integral community we object to being segregated by the imposition of obsolete and arbitrary barriers, we do resent the artificial creation of social grades, and we regard with antagonism and distrust the unjust accumulation of labour-created wealth in the hands of the idle and incapable few. "But if this is the standpoint of the great mass of the democracy, to us of the Amalgamated Unions of Railway Workers and Permanent Way Staffs the invidious distinction has a closer significance. As ordinary citizens our sense of equality is outraged by the demarcations I have referred to; but as our work often places us in a temporary subordination to the occupants of these so-called first and second classes, whom we despise intellectually and resent economically, we incur the additional stigma of having to render them an external deference which we recognise to be obsolete and servile. The Arden and Avon Valley case, which earned the martyrdom of dismissal for William Jukson and ultimately involved forty thousand of us in a now historic strike, simply because that heroic man categorically refused to the doddering Duke of Pentarlington any other title than the honourable appellation of 'Comrade,' is doubtless still fresh within your minds. We lost on that occasion through insufficiency of funds, but the ducal portmanteau over which William Jukson took his memorable stand, will yet serve as a rallying point to a more successful issue."