it might do no harm if I could blow the whole tangle of this society to hell
with dynamite."
"Yes, and what of that?" asked Fisher.
"Only that I'm going to blow it to hell with dynamite," said Harold March,
"and I think it right to give you fair warning. For a long time I didn't believe
things were as bad as you said they were. But I never felt as if I could have
bottled up what you knew, supposing you really knew it. Well, the long and
the short of it is that I've got a conscience; and now, at last, I've also got a
chance. I've been put in charge of a big independent paper, with a free hand,
and we're going to open a cannonade on corruption."
"That will be—Attwood, I suppose," said Fisher, reflectively.
"Timber merchant. Knows a lot about China."
"He knows a lot about England," said March, doggedly, "and now I know
it, too, we're not going to hush it up any longer. The people of this country
have a right to know how they're ruled—or, rather, ruined. The Chancellor is
in the pocket of the money lenders and has to do as he is told; otherwise he's
bankrupt, and a bad sort of bankruptcy, too, with nothing but cards and
actresses behind it. The Prime Minister was in the petrol-contract business;
and deep in it, too. The Foreign Minister is a wreck of drink and drugs. When
you say that plainly about a man who may send thousands of Englishmen to
die for nothing, you're called personal. If a poor engine driver gets drunk and
sends thirty or forty people to death, nobody complains of the exposure being
personal. The engine driver is not a person."
"I quite agree with you," said Fisher, calmly. "You are perfectly right.""If you agree with us, why the devil don't you act with us?" demanded his
friend. "If you think it's right, why don't you do what's right? It's awful to think
of a man of your abilities simply blocking the road to reform."
"We have often talked about that," replied Fisher, with the same
composure. "The Prime Minister is my father's friend. The Foreign Minister
married my sister. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is my first cousin. I
mention the genealogy in some detail just now for a particular reason. The
truth is I have a curious kind of cheerfulness at the moment. It isn't altogether
the sun and the sea, sir. I am enjoying an emotion that is entirely new to me; a
happy sensation I never remember having had before."
"What the devil do you mean?"
"I am feeling proud of my family," said Horne Fisher.
Harold March stared at him with round blue eyes, and seemed too much
mystified even to ask a question. Fisher leaned back in his chair in his lazy