Page:The council of seven.djvu/255

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  • 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