shadow on the
pavement, the faces flowed past Stephen with a pallid intensity which
made him think of dead flowers drifting on a river. In all those faces
how little life there seemed, how little individuality and animation!

"When I was a small kid I used to live by the seashore," said the old
man presently in his dry, emphatic tones. "Many is the time I've stood
and watched the tide coming in, and I never once saw it come in that it
didn't go out again."

"Then you believe that the tide is turning against Vetch?"

For a minute, while they sped on in the obscurity of a side street,
Darrow meditated.

"No, sir, I ain't saying that much--not yet. But the way I calculate is
something like this. Vetch came in on a wave of popular emotion, and a
wave of popular emotion is just about like the tide of the sea. It may
rise a certain distance, but it can't stand still, and it can't go any
farther. It's obliged to turn; and when it turns, it's pretty sure to
bring back a good deal that it carried with it. A crowd impulse--as they
call it in the pulpit and on the platform--is a dangerous thing. It's
dangerous because you can't count on it."

"It looks to me as if Vetch counted upon it a little too much."

"That's his nature. He was born on the sunny side of the street. He
thinks because he sees the way to help people that they want to be
helped. I've been mixed up in politics now for fifty years, and in the
labour movement, as they say, ever since it began to move in the
South--and I've found out that people don't really want to be
helped--they want to be fooled. Vetch offers 'em facts, and all the time
it ain't facts they're wanting, but names."

"I see," assented Stephen. "Names that they can repeat over and over
until they get at last to believe that they are things. Long
reverberating names like Democratic or Republican--"

Darrow laughed grimly. "That's right, sir, that's the way I've worked it
out in my mind. The crowd will come a little way after a fact; but in
the end it gets tired because the fact won't work magic, like that
conjure-stuff of the darkeys, and then it turns and goes back to the old
names that mean nothing. Only when a crowd moves all together it's
dangerous because it's like the flood-tide and ebb-tide of the sea."

"And the most irritating part of it," said Stephen, with an insight
which had sometimes visited him in the trenches, "is that it gets what
it deserves because it can always have what