The news ran like wildfire through Imperialist circles of the City that
Sir Munt had “ratted.” Moreover, the influence of a particularly honest
and forcible man was such that he threatened to carry with him some of
the acknowledged stays of his party. A situation at once arose that was
a fitting prelude to the most significant by-election within living
memory.
No matter what the moral defects of the prime minister might be, he
was a very old and sure hand at the parliament game. His choice of
John Endor to throw down the gage of battle to the U. P. was almost
inspired. It might thunder up and down the land, but there was no
disguising that a prophet had arisen to fight the cause of the
oppressed Middle Class. John Endor made a fine champion for the small
trader, the struggling professional man, and the people whose moderate,
fixed incomes were being taxed out of existence.
The U. P. did not take long to realize the danger of its guns being
spiked. Its batteries might thunder unceasingly, the real issues might
be obscured in a cloud of poison gas, all its black arts might be
called into play, but from the start there was no burking the fact that
for once the Newspaper Ring was not going to have a walk-over.
To begin with, it was soon apparent that Cosmos Alley had shown less
than its usual acumen in choosing a candidate. At the first blush,
Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim, with his protection for key industries,
preferential tariffs within the Empire and other shining lures for a
purely mercantile community was “the sure card.” But, as John Endor’s
first meeting proved, the U. P. champion was not well adapted to
withstand the fire of criticism that was suddenly directed upon him
from an unexpected quarter.
To the surprise of every politician in the City, the chair at Mr.
Endor’s first meeting was occupied by Blackhampton’s Big Noise. For
years Sir Josiah Munt had held a unique position in its public life.
He was the friend of every good cause. If money had to be raised for a
worthy object, a piece of legislation demanded, or a wrong denounced it
was “as sure as Monday morning” that Sir Munt in his own characteristic
fashion would sit at a small table with a tiny hammer in his hand in
the center of the platform of the City’s largest public hall. Moreover,
he would bring the occasion home in a few words peculiarly his own. In
the art of “putting it over” he had locally no equal. Disdaining mere
grammar, verbal finesse, minor niceties of form, at all times he knew
how to speak man to man to the citizens.
At the Chairman’s table, Sir Munt was a formidable proposition. He
was very much a master man. And from the outset of the fight for
Blackhampton East, the friends of Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim had to keep
the fact ever before them.
“Seems to some on us, gentlemen,” said Sir Munt, in the course of his
opening remarks, at Mr. Endor’s first meeting, “that our Colonial
friend with the old Yorkshire name, who is so keen to help us over
here, might do almost as well in Ottawa, trying to persuade the Land of
Promise to give a square deal to people not so happily situated. Some
on us in this hall, who helped to provide his country with the money
that has done so much to make her the proposition she is to-day, have
not forgotten her Government’s dealings with the Grand Trunk Railway.
Those of us in the city who happened to hold the stock have not
forgotten how its proprietors were frozen out by penal legislation. I,
for one, gentlemen, intend to keep that little episode in mind.”
This was “some” beginning and when the Chairman went on in the racy
style in which all public meetings delight, to give his opinion of the
U. P. and the inevitable result of government by newspaper, the first
fruits of which the country had already reaped, his words fell as seed
on a prepared soil. John Endor’s speech was in a different key. His
platform manner had not the breadth, the force, the abounding humor of
the Mayor’s, but it did not lack “punch.” There was a quality of voice,
bearing and gesture which lent to a deliberate, almost leisurely choice
of phrase, a moral conviction that drove every word home. The eye of
the seer and the fervor of the prophet when under the discipline of the
will seldom fail in their impact upon an audience of average people
which often has a flair for just those qualities in which it knows
itself to be lacking.
John Endor’s first meeting produced a mighty reverberation. It was
heard all over the City. But it was a mere prelude to the fight. And
what a fight! The “graft” that Sir Munt had feared came powerfully into
play. That amazing organization, the U. P., had its unseen tentacles
fixed very firmly in the vitals of the nation. It was the biggest
Trust in the world’s history, beginning with the Government itself and
filtering down through every department of commerce and public life to
the smallest retail dealer and the humblest newsboy. For their interest
and good will it had something substantial to barter.
The Universal Press was very popular. In the art of saying the direct
opposite of what it did it had little to learn. It hurled the thunders
of Jove against high prices, the Capitalist Ring, the extravagance of
Government departments and oppressive taxation, but all its private
acts, under the rose, were directed to the fostering of the very things
it denounced in language so fiery. Behind everything was its fixed aim
that the many should bleed for the few. Lip service to democracy was a
profitable and delightfully simple game; the many, of its very nature,
is easy to gull. Not having learned to think for itself, the word of
its newspapers is taken for gospel. And should trouble arise, a dole
from the pocket of somebody else can be relied on as a rule to repair
the mischief.
So great was the power of “the machine,” when it came into play, that
to the people of most experience it was very doubtful indeed whether
it was humanly possible to defeat “the Ring.” The U. P. propaganda was
subtle and it was all-pervading. Its subscribers were reckoned by the
million, and, in return for countless benefits, for the most part quite
illusory, a modified code of trade-union regulations was imposed upon
its members. Some genius of Universe Building had devised a Roll of
Good Citizenship. A certificate on vellum was granted to all the world
and his wife, to whom in return for divers pledges, “the due observance
of which could not fail to be of immense value to the State,” divers
privileges were offered.
The art of creating public opinion had been raised to a pitch unknown
in the history of mankind. This half-baked Democracy of the “movie”
and the cheap journal had an intellectual life wholly dependent upon
catchwords, of which its mentors had a never-failing supply. None the
less, the corps of registered and scientifically organized subscribers
to the U. P. was a truly formidable body, who it was confidently
believed must turn the scale at any parliamentary election.
If you wore in your buttonhole a small purple disc emblazoned with
the Prince of Wales’ feathers which was given you in exchange for a
year’s subscription, paid in advance, to the _Planet_, the _Mercury_ or
any of the thousand-and-one daily or weekly publications of the U. P.
throughout the habitable globe, you were free of a great society which
had the power of conferring subtle and unexpected benefits upon you.
With that talisman in your buttonhole any retail grocer between China
and Peru was bound to take twopence off a half-pound packet of U. P.
tea. And There Was No Tea Like It. The great ones of the earth, from
the Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Augustus Bimley to Rube Rooker,
the pitcher of the Chicago Pinksox and White Walker the Black Hope of
South Dakota, continually affirmed that inspiring truth in tube and
bus, in every newspaper, on every hoarding. There Was No Tea Like It.
It was the same with U. P. cocoa, U. P. tobacco, U. P. condensed milk,
U. P. canned pears. If you bought a U. P. reach-me-down you were
entitled to free membership of Blackburn Rovers, or Tottenham Hotspur,
or Old Trafford, or Kennington Oval, or the U. P. Music Roll Society,
or the U. P. Book Club, according to your geographical situation and
your natural proclivities. Moreover, each purchase entitled you to a
coupon. And if in the course of a twelve-month your coupons amounted
to a given number, calculated upon a nicely graduated schedule, you
were entitled to a new scale of benefits ranging from a freehold
residence in the U. P. Garden City, or a five-cylindered U. P.
automobile, to a free seat from three till five every Sunday afternoon
at the local U. P. moving picture house.
These were material benefits. It was the aim of the U. P. not only
to make the world safe for democracy, but also a Utopia for its
subscribers to live in. If you wore a U. P. hat, it had a bearing on
your bus fare between Cricklewood and East Finchley, or your tube
ticket from Barons Court to the Elephant and Castle. If you required
a set of false teeth or the best advice in regard to an early divorce
you took out a three-year subscription to the _Planet_ newspaper; if
you merely needed a safety razor or a pair of button boots with glacé
kid uppers, a three months’ subscription to the U. P. _Literary Digest_
might meet the case.
With all the resources of a brand-new cosmos at his back, a
full-fledged U. P. parliamentary candidate was indeed a proposition.
John Endor and his friends realized that from the start; but the
character of the contest and the nature of the odds nerved them for
the fight. The U. P. might weave its web, but John Endor’s transparent
honesty began to gain ground in spite of all that its newspapers and
its “graft” could do. Blackhampton was the exact center of England in
the geographical sense and at moments of crisis in the national life,
when great decisions had sometimes to be taken on inadequate premises,
that fact generally reacted on the minds of its citizens. In the local
idiom “they could see as far through a brick wall as most.” And in
the matter of a Stunt election it was well for themselves and for the
country at large that they were endowed with this faculty. Otherwise,
Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim must have had a walk-over.
As it was, that gentleman and those who stood behind him were soon
alive to the situation. On the surface everything seemed in their
favor. The arts of the U. P. were designed for such an occasion; few
could hope to stand against its peculiar blend of malfeasance; but from
the outset the personal equation came into play. Endor himself was a
born orator; the wife he had so recently married, with her attractive
presence and her quick American wits, made a brilliantly effective
figure on his platform; and with the Mayor of the City, that old idol
of the populace to father them, they formed a combination which in time
and place was irresistible. A John Endor meeting could always put an
enemy conventicle “to bed.” Nor in the matter of “sideshows,” as Sir
Munt called them, was the enemy allowed to have things all his own
way, as might have been the case in an agricultural constituency or a
dead-alive cathedral city.
Blackhampton’s Mayor, having satisfied himself as to where the truth
lay, was not a man for half measures. Promptly he set his hand to the
plow. And it was set in grim earnest. The first manifestation of this
fact appeared in the sky.
On the night of the procession by torchlight, just as the admired Sir
Augustus Bimley was about to address the Charwomen of England from the
plinth of John Bright’s statue, something went suddenly wrong with that
huge illuminated sky sign--Endor Must Go--which made Market Square as
bright as day.
The Lord Bishop of Blackhampton was in the middle of his prayer when
the noble illumination which the prelate had referred to as a light in
a great darkness began to fizzle. By the time the prayer was at an end
the light had gone out.
A feeling of anticlimax smote the gathering when Sir Augustus Bimley
rose to address it. Endor Must Go had been taken at its word. The
delegates to the Charwoman’s Conference felt a sense of desolation,
which the fervent language they now heard could not remove. Moreover,
Britain’s Best, etc., was fairly under way, his eyes in a fine frenzy
rolling, when suddenly there happened a strange thing.
The U. P. masterpiece in sky signs had not been merely snuffed out; it
had been eclipsed. But in a literal sense it was now outshone. From
above the City Hall in gigantic letters there flamed suddenly forth
across Market Square the amazing legend: