stand for it. Time was when, if a man like Weedie had put up
his head, nobody'd have taken the trouble to bash it. We should have
laughed."

"We don't laugh now," said Choate gravely. There was even warning in his
voice. "Not since Weedie and his like have told the working class it
owns the earth."

"And doesn't it?"

"Yes. In numbers. It can vote itself right into destruction--which is
what it's doing."

"And Weedie wants to be mayor."

"God knows what he wants. Mayor, and then governor and--I wouldn't
undertake to say where Weedie'd be willing to stop. Not short of an
ambassadorship."

"Choate," said Jeffrey cheerfully, "you're an alarmist."

"Oh, no, I'm not. A man like Weedie can get anywhere, because he's no
scruples and he can rake in mere numbers to back him. And it's all
right. This is a democracy. If the majority of the people want a
demagogue to rule over them, they've a perfect right to go to the devil
their own way."

"But where's he get his infernal influence? Weedie Moore!"

"He gets it by telling every man what the man wants to hear. He gets
hold of the ignorant alien, and tells him he is a king in his own right.
He tells him Weedie'll get him shorter and shorter hours, and make him a
present of the machinery he runs--or let him break it--and the poor
devil believes him. Weedie has told him that's the kind of a country
this is. And nobody else is taking the trouble to tell him anything
else."

"Well, for God's sake, why don't they?"

"Because we're riddled with compassion, I tell you. If we see a man
poorer than we are, we get so apologetic we send him bouquets--our women
do."

"Is that what the women here are doing?"

"Oh, yes. If there's a strike over at Long Meadow they put on their furs
and go over and call on a few operatives and find eight living in one
room, in a happy thrift, and they come back and hold an indignation
meeting and 'protest'."

"You're not precisely a sentimentalist, are you?" said Jeff. He was
seeing Choate in the new Addington as Choate presented it.

"No, by George! I want to see things clarified and the good
old-fashioned virtues come back into their place--justice and
common-sense. Compassion is something to die for. But you can't build
states out of it alone. It makes me sick--sick, when I see men getting
dry-rot."

Jeff's face was a map of dark emotion. His mind went back over the past
years. He had not been made soft by the nemesis that laid him by the