I had a second opportunity of speaking strongly, this time to O’Rane; and I failed to press it. The papers that night gave long accounts of the opening of parliament and longer, less hackneyed descriptions of the demonstration by the unemployed. I detected for the first time a note of uneasiness as, for the first time, unemployment passed out of the realm of abstract statistics and incarnated itself in ragged armies of hungry men. I remembered Philip Hornbeck’s blithe assurance that Griffiths could do little harm so long as the armies were scattered; well, their banners shewed that they were scattered no longer. One nervous leader-writer compared this march with the advance of the Marseillais on Paris and asked angrily how the police had allowed it; another, more valiant, rehearsed the history of the Fascismo movement in Italy and warned the proletariat at large—without considering whether the proletariat was likely to read such a paper—that England would never yield to mob-violence. A third, mentioning O’Rane by name, exhumed the controversy of the summer and enquired whether those who had voluntarily undertaken a national responsibility could abandon it at such a time in satisfaction of a “doctrinaire whim”. In less blunt terms than the sandwichman had displayed, O’Rane’s ‘sentence of death’ was brought up against him; and it was with some muddled, premonitory feeling of an isolated conflict between Griffiths and the O’Ranes that I uttered my warning. “Suspend your sentence,” I said, “until the new government has declared its unemployment policy.” O’Rane replied with the entirely logical and utterly irrelevant thesis that unemployment was a consequence of the war, that the community had called the tune and must pay the piper, that one government had imposed conscription of men’s lives and that another could impose conscription of their wealth. The state had turned prosperous civilians into soldiers; the state must turn these soldiers back into prosperous civilians. His cold reasoning and neat phrasing reminded me of a speech at some undergraduate debating-society. “I can only hope,” I said, “that you won’t have to say ‘no’ again.” Hungry men had no time for debating-society arguments. I hoped, too, that Sonia would not be forced to say ‘no’ again. Hungry men had no taste for being ordered to walk from Westminster to Hampstead as a move in the game with her husband. I said no more. And, amid my self-reproaches, I find a barren comfort in the knowledge that neither Sonia nor her husband would have listened, though one rose from the dead to warn them. 3