e
another key, mellow, confident, hinting at personal satisfaction; a
smile was on his lips, and not a smile of scorn. He rested one hand
against his side, holding in the other a scrap of paper with jotted
items of reasoning. His head was thrown a little back; he viewed the
benches from beneath his eyelids. True, the pose maintained itself but
for a moment. I mention it because it was something new in Richard.

He spoke of the land; he attacked the old monopoly, and visioned a time
when a claim to individual ownerships of the earth's surface would be as
ludicrous as were now the assertion of title to a fee-simple
somewhere in the moon. He mustered statistics; he adduced historic and
contemporary example of the just and the unjust in land-holding; he
gripped the throat of a certain English duke, and held him up for
flagellation; he drifted into oceans of economic theory; he sat down
by the waters of Babylon; he climbed Pisgah. Had he but spoken of
backslidings in the wilderness! But for that fatal omission, the lecture
was, of its kind, good. By degrees Richard forgot his pose and the
carefully struck note of mellowness; he began to believe what he was
saying, and to say it with the right vigour of popular oratory. Forget
his struggles with the h-fiend; forget his syntactical lapses; you saw
that after all the man had within him a clear flame of conscience; that
he had felt before speaking that speech was one of the uses for which
Nature had expressly framed him. His invective seldom degenerated into
vulgar abuse; one discerned in him at least the elements of what we call
good taste; of simple manliness he disclosed not a little; he had some
command of pathos. In conclusion, he finished without reference to his
personal concerns.

The chairman invited questions, preliminary to debate.

He rose half-way down the room,--the man who invariably rises on
these occasions. He was oldish, with bent shoulders, and wore
spectacles--probably a clerk of forty years' standing. In his hand was
a small note-book, which he consulted. He began with measured utterance,
emphatic, loud.

'I wish to propose to the lecturer seven questions. I will read them in
order; I have taken some pains to word them clearly.'

Richard has his scrap of paper on his knee. He jots a word or two after
each deliberate interrogation, smiling.

Other questioners succeeded. Richard replies to them. He fails to
satisfy the man of seven queries, who, after r