they twirled them in the
faces of the people with deliberate provocation.

Besides the special detail of picked men who moved about the stand,
occasionally clubbing an inoffensive man, a battalion of three hundred
reserves was drawn up in serried lines about a hundred yards to the
north on the edge of Fourth Avenue. Between these reserves and the
crowd about the stand an open space was kept clear for their possible
assault in case of any disturbance.

Near these reserves stood the big red automobile of Hamberger, the
police captain of the District. He was reputed to be a millionaire,
though his salary had never been more than enough to support his wife
and children. The sight of his fat insolent face as the representative
of Law and Order gave Stuart the impression of farce so irresistibly
that he laughed. Surely some of Bivens's sinister philosophy to which
he had listened yesterday had a pretty solid basis in the facts of our
everyday life.

When the speaking began Stuart pressed his way as close as possible,
drawing Nan with him.

He was astonished at the genuine eloquence and power with which the
first speaker, evidently of anarchistic leanings, developed his theme,
a passionate plea for freedom and the highest development of the
individual man. He sketched the growth of the American Republic from
its crude beginning in the unbroken forests, and showed with clear
historic grasp how all the thinking and creative deeds which had added
anything to the sum of human progress belonged to this period of
anarchistic liberties. He traced the growth of tyranny in the
development of our system of laws until to-day we were less free than
the people of England, who lived under the hereditary king against whom
our fathers had rebelled. A tyranny of corrupt and ignorant politicians
he denounced as the lowest and vilest yet evolved in history.

His concluding sentences roused his crowd to a pitch of wild
enthusiasm.

"In the Old World, from which your fathers and mothers fled in search
of freedom, men enslaved their fellow-men by becoming lords, dukes or
kings, murdering or poisoning their way to a castle or a throne. The
methods of your modern masters are more subtle and successful. You vote
to make them your masters, and still imagine that you are free.

"Freedom belongs to him who would be free. And at last the masses of
the people are becoming restless, not so much because they lack leisure
and luxury, but because the