They joked from table to table, and sometimes the whole room would quiet down while some one told a joke, which invariably wound up with a roar of laughter.
"Why," I said, "these people have a whole life, a whole society, of their own!" In the midst of this jollity the clear voice of a girl rang out with the first lines of a song.

Instantly the room was hushed: Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched of the earth, For justice thunders condemnation A better world's in birth.
These were the words she sang, and when the clear, sweet voice died down the whole company, as though by a common impulse, arose from their chairs, and joined in a great swelling chorus: It is the final conflict, Let each stand in his place, The Brotherhood of Man Shall be the human race.
It was beyond belief, to me, the spirit with which these words were sung.

In no sense with jollity--all that seemed to have been dropped when they came to their feet--but with an unmistakable fervour of faith.
Some of the things I had thought and dreamed about secretly among the hills of my farm all these years, dreamed about as being something far off and as unrealizable as the millennium, were here being sung abroad with jaunty faith by these weavers of Kilburn, these weavers and workers whom I had schooled myself to regard with a sort of distant pity.
Hardly had the company sat down again, with a renewal of the flow of jolly conversation When I heard a rapping on one of the tables.

I saw the great form of R----- D----- slowly rising.
"Brothers and sisters," he said, "a word of caution.

The authorities will lose no chance of putting us in the wrong.