y startling plain truth.
The League had no favors to ask of anybody, had nothing to conceal, was
strongly opposed to any and all political concealments. Thus, its
speakers enjoyed a freedom not usual in political speaking--and Dorn
and his fellow-leaders were careful that no router, no exaggerator or
well intentioned wild man of any kind should open his mouth under a
league banner. THAT was what made the League so dangerous--and so
steadily prosperous.

The chairman, Thomas Colman, the cooper, was opening the meeting in a
speech which was an instance of how well a man of no platform talent
can acquit himself when he believes something and believes it is his
duty to convey it to his fellow-men. Victor Dorn, to be the fourth
speaker and the orator of the evening, was standing at the rear of the
platform partially concealed by the crowd of men and women leaders of
the party grouped behind Colman. As always at the big formal
demonstrations of the League, Victor was watching every move. This
evening his anxiety was deeper than ever before. His trained political
sagacity warned him that, as he had suggested to Selma, the time of his
party's first great crisis was at hand. No movement could become
formidable with out a life and death struggle, when its aim frankly was
to snatch power from the dominant class and to place it where that
class could not hope to prevail either by direct means of force or by
its favorite indirect means of bribery. What would Kelly do? What
would be his stroke at the very life of the League?--for Victor had
measured Kelly and knew he was not one to strike until he could destroy.

Like every competent man of action, Victor had measured his own
abilities, and had found that they were to be relied upon. But the
contest between him and Kelly--the contest in the last ditch--was so
appallingly unequal. Kelly had the courts and the police, the moneyed
class, the employers of labor, had the clergy and well-dressed
respectability, the newspapers, all the customary arbiters of public
sentiment. Also, he had the criminal and the semi-criminal classes.
And what had the League?

The letter of the law, guaranteeing freedom of innocent speech and
action, guaranteeing the purity of the ballot--no, not guaranteeing,
but simply asserting those rights, and leaving the upholding of them
to--Kelly's allies and henchmen! Also, the League had the power of
between a thousand and fifteen hundred intelligent an