ot that you and he will hold me; not that you
will stop me; but what you think and say will bind me to your wishes
tighter than any chains you might forge. What you and he think is more
powerful than all the material forces of this universe. For what you
and he think is public opinion. It is not substantial; it is not
palpable. It may not readily be translated into terms of money, or
power, or vital force. But it crushes all these things before it. When
this public opinion rises sure and firm and strong, no material force
on this earth can stop it. For a time it may be dammed and checked.
For a day or a week or a year or a decade it may be turned from its
channel; yet money cannot hold it; arms cannot hold it; cunning cannot
baffle it. For it is God moving among men. Thus He manifests Himself
in this earth. Through the centuries, amid the storm and stress of
time, often muffled, often strangled, often incoherent, often raucous
and inarticulate with anguish, but always in the end triumphant, the
voice of the people is indeed the voice of God!

Nearly a dozen years had passed since the Russian painted the picture
of John Barclay, which hangs in the public library of Sycamore Ridge,
and in that time the heart of the American people had changed. Barclay
was beginning to feel upon him, night and day, the crushing weight of
popular scorn. He called the idea envy, but it was not envy. It was
the idea working in the world, and the weight of the scorn was
beginning to crumple his soul; for this idea that the people were
thinking was finding its way into newspapers, magazines, and books.
They were beginning to question the divine right of wealth to rule,
because it was wealth--an idea that Barclay could not comprehend even
vaguely. The term honest wealth, which was creeping into respectable
periodicals, was exceedingly annoying to him. For the very presence of
the term seemed to indicate that there was such a thing as dishonest
wealth,--an obvious absurdity; and when he addressed the students of
the Southwestern University at their commencement exercises in 1902,
his address attracted considerable attention because it deplored the
modern tendency in high places toward socialism and warned the
students that a nation of iconoclasts would perish from the earth. But
the people went on questioning the divine right of wealth to rule. In
the early part of 1903 Barclay was astounded at the action of a score
of his senators and nearly a h