c. Some called him a patriot who put humanity above
nationality, a new John the Baptist come out of the wilderness to
preach a sobering doctrine of world-peace to a world made drunk on
war. And these were his followers. Of the first--his friends--there
were not many left. Of the second group there were millions that
multiplied themselves. Of the third there had been at the outset but a
timorous and furtive few, and they mostly men and women who spoke
English, if they spoke it at all, with the halting speech and the
twisted idiom that betrayed their foreign birth; being persons who
found it entirely consistent to applaud the preachment of planetic
disarmament out of one side of their mouths, and out of the other side
of their mouths to pray for the success at arms of the War Lord whose
hand had shoved the universe over the rim of the chasm. But each
passing day now saw them increasing in number and in audacity. Taking
courage to themselves from the courage of their apostle, these, his
disciples, were beginning to shout from the housetops what once they
had only dared whisper beneath the eaves. Disloyalty no longer
smouldered; it was blazing up. It crackled, and threw off firebrands.

Of all those who sat in judgment upon the acts and the utterances of
the man--and this classification would include every articulate
creature in the United States who was old enough to be reasonable--or
unreasonable--only a handful had the right diagnosis for the case.
Here and there were to be found men who knew he was neither crazed nor
inspired; and quite rightly they put no credence in the charge that he
had sold himself for pieces of silver to the enemy of his own nation.
They knew what ailed the Honourable Jason Mallard--that he was a
victim of a strangulated ambition, of an egotistic hernia. He was
hopelessly ruptured in his vanity. All his life he had lived on love
of notoriety, and by that same perverted passion he was being eaten
up. Once he had diligently besought the confidence and the affections
of a majority of his fellow citizens; now he seemed bent upon
consolidating their hate for him into a common flood and laving
himself in it. Well, if such was his wish he was having it; there was
no denying that.

In the prime of his life, before he was fifty, it had seemed that
almost for the asking the presidency might have been his. He had been
born right, as the saying goes, and bred right, to make suitable
presidential timber. He