That verdict was pronounced in my private hearing by Griffiths himself, with a warning that he would repeat it publicly if the government failed to give him instant satisfaction. Our second interview was no more of my seeking than the first. When the House rose without curing unemployment then and there, he made it known—first of all at a mass-meeting in Trafalgar Square and then in handbills which were distributed about the streets—that he would instruct ministers in the meaning of unemployment by confronting them with the unemployed. This, in the vague phrase which he favoured, would “put things to the test”. The demonstrations at the opening of parliament had been hardly more than a parade. “Hunger marches” were now to be organized in every part of the country, converging on London at the same moment. After that . . .? I noticed that Griffiths carefully refrained from saying what would happen when fifty, or a hundred, thousand disappointed men found themselves empty-handed, empty-bellied, foot-sore and resentful at the closed door of an impotent office. And I pointed out this sinister omission in the next number of _Peace_. There was nothing, Hornbeck told me at this time, in the speech or the manifesto to justify police interference; but any one who remembered Griffiths’ share in organizing the land-grabbing campaign could imagine how this new demonstration would be conducted and how it was likely to end. I went farther than most of my _confrères_ and denounced the manifesto as deliberately provocative. Griffiths called to inform me that, if I chose to print lies, he could not stop me, but that, if I was interested in the truth, I might perhaps be not too proud to hear it from him. I professed a prompt eagerness for truth in any form, though I was more interested to know what amusement or instruction he derived from so painfully academic a journal as _Peace_. I wondered how he came to associate me with its direction and why he visited me in Seymour Street rather than in Fetter Lane. My curiosity on this last point was satisfied when he ran a practised eye over the dimensions of the house and asked me how many the establishment comprised. “You? And your wife? And six servants?,” he recapitulated. “No kids? A car and a man to drive it? Four meals a day? You don’t call _that_ provocative?” “If we had fewer servants, you’d have more unemployed,” I pointed out. “It takes three men and four women to keep the two of you alive. The house is half empty. You waste more food in a day than my people eat in a week. You drive about in your jewels and fine clothes among people who’ve been cold and hungry for months. And then you tell me not to be . . . ‘provocative’!” I reminded him that we were supposed to be discussing unemployment. “I shan’t remedy that by going about in rags,” I said, “or by shutting up half the house.”