His speech began almost stumblingly, his h’s ran loose, and his grammar became involved, but it was seen that he meant business, that he had that to say which would give anxiety to the Government, that he had a case wherein were the elements of popular interest and appeal, and that he was thinking and speaking as thousands outside the House would think and speak. He had waited for this hour. Indirectly he owed to Claridge Pasha all that he had become. The day in which David knocked him down saw the depths of his degradation reached, and, when he got up, it was to start on a new life uncertainly, vaguely at first, but a new life for all that. He knew, from a true source, of Eglington’s personal hatred of Claridge Pasha, though he did not guess their relationship; and all his interest was enlisted for the man who had, as he knew, urged Kate Heaver to marry himself--and Kate was his great ambition now. Above and beyond these personal considerations was a real sense of England’s duty to the man who was weaving the destiny of a new land. “It isn’t England’s business?” he retorted, in answer to an interjection from a faithful soul behind the ministerial Front Bench. “Well, it wasn’t the business of the Good Samaritan to help the man that had been robbed and left for dead by the wayside; but he did it. As to David Claridge’s work, some have said that--I’ve no doubt it’s been said in the Cabinet, and it is the thing the Under-Secretary would say as naturally as he would flick a fly from his boots--that it’s a generation too soon. Who knows that? I suppose there was those that thought John the Baptist was baptising too soon, that Luther preached too soon, and Savonarola was in too great a hurry, all because he met his death and his enemies triumphed--and Galileo and Hampden and Cromwell and John Howard were all too soon. Who’s to be judge of that? God Almighty puts it into some men’s minds to work for a thing that’s a great, and maybe an impossible, thing, so far as the success of the moment is concerned. Well, for a thing that has got to be done some time, the seed has to be sown, and it’s always sown by men like Claridge Pasha, who has shown millions of people--barbarians and half-civilised alike--what a true lover of the world can do. God knows, I think he might have stayed and found a cause in England, but he elected to go to the ravaging Soudan, and he is England there, the best of it. And I know Claridge Pasha--from his youth up I have seen him, and I stand here to bear witness of what the working men of England will say to-morrow. Right well the noble lord yonder knows that what I say is true. He has known it for years. Claridge Pasha would never have been in his present position, if the noble lord had not listened to the enemies of Claridge Pasha and of this country, in preference to those who know and hold the truth as I tell it here to-day. I don’t know whether the noble lord has repented or not;