“I tell you, friends, you can never touch these people but through their pockets. The law’s a fraud, and when they don’t find it suit, they laugh at it. And they don’t care a damn for you or your wives or children or your souls or your bodies or the lives of your boys or the virtue of your daughters--but only for what they can make out of you. And they talk about the freedom of the country, and the Declaration of Independence, and ballots and that; and all the time they ape their swell English friends and marry their girls off to rotten foreign princes and would have a king here if they could--except that it’s easier to throw the dust in our eyes under what they call a republic. “And now I say, don’t you care a damn for their laws, either. And if they hire their Pinkerton spies who are paid to shoot you down, you shoot them too. They won’t care much for that; but then when you burn a big works, and blow up a mine or two, they’ll see their money going and squeal fast enough. That’s all I’ve got to say.” Derwent had listened to his speech intently, none the less so that threatening glances were cast at him from time to time. As he finished, a score or more of orators leaped to the platform; and many of them began to speak at once. Starbuck, having done his work, disappeared; the crowd was beginning to thin; the speakers spoke in Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Sicilian, each in the dialect of his own audience. Many were waving their hands violently and making threatening gestures in the direction of the city, which lurked, black and sullen, below them in the valley, shrouded in the thick smoke itself had made, bright-pointed here and there with many torches; and now and again from the bowels of the thing would burst a blaze of white-hot metal, like the opening of the monster’s fiery eye, ending in a wide red glare and a hissing shower of sparks; and all was dark again. Hardly any men of the English race were by this time left upon the ground. Derwent noticed it, as he stood watching, in one corner of the throng; and thought how un-American a scene it was. At last the anarchist who had first begun stood up again, as if to close the meeting. This time his voice seemed stronger or more sibilant; his speech was but a string of curses, of tales of crime, full of a savage’s lust of ruin. _Let it end! Let them suffer, too; let them die, as we have died. If they mean to starve us now, let these mills and machines, these tools of wrong, these mines, these gaols of wretchedness, let them all burn or blast--what care we--we who are to be burned or hanged ourselves? Let their towns be gutted, and their homes be razed and their factories be burned--aye, let them burn, burn, burn, as this shall burn, from now on, day and night, winter and summer, for all time!_