ending with South Africa.'

'Oh! my dear!--I warn you,' said Lady Tallant, bending from her end of
the table and addressing the Leichardt'stonians generally. 'Lady
Bridget is a little Englander, a pro-Boer, a champion of the poor
oppressed native. If she had been alive then she'd have wanted to hand
India back to the Indians after the Mutiny, and now when she has made
Cecil Rhodes Emperor of Rhodesia, she'll give over all the rest again
to the Dutch.'

Bridget responded calmly to the indictment.

'Yes, I would--if Cecil Rhodes were to decline the Emperorship of all
South Africa--which I should make his job. . . . But you'd better add
on that I'm a Socialist too, Rosamond, because I've become one, as you
know. I think the working man is in a shamefully unjust position, and
that the capitalists are no better than slave-drivers.'

'Oh, not out here, my word!' exclaimed a Leichardt'stonian who happened
to be one of the old squattocracy. 'The landowners and the capitalists
are not slave-drivers, they are slave-driven. We've got to pay what the
Trades' Union organisers tell us--or else go without stockmen or
shearers. Fact is, our Labour War is only just beginning; and I can
tell you, Sir, that before a year is out the so-called bloated
capitalist and the sheep and cattle station owner will sing either
pretty big or very small.'

'I don't think it will be very small--on MY station,' murmured
McKeith. 'But it's quite true about the Labour War. They're organising,
as they call it, already all along the Leura.'