“Oh gosh,” said the Inger, “you could hand ’em out like fish off the coals, and save ’em, alive and kicking, and cord ’em up somewheres, and rip back for more.” “Why?” asked Lory. “Why would you do that—if it didn’t make any difference?” “Because you’d be a dub if you didn’t,” he replied simply. He was silent for a minute, played at picking her up in his arms, holding her, hewing through the crowd, trampling them out of the way, and as he went, kissing her when he pleased. To him the hall dimmed and went out.... Then he heard the chairman speaking. The chairman was a man of thick body and bent head, with watching eyes, and a mouth that shut as a fist shuts. His voice went over the hall like a horn. The meeting had been called because something must be done—something must be done. The war had dragged on until the world was sucked. Men, women, children, money, arms, cities, nations, were heaped on the wreck. The wreck _was_ the world. Something must be done—something must be done. In all the earth stood only one great nation, untouched of carnage, fat, peopled—and peopled with sons of the warring world. This meeting had been called because something must be done. There were those who had come to tell what to do. To those who comprehended, the weight of the moment lay in the chaos of applause which took the house. The air of the place, languid, silent, casual, for all that one observed, abruptly solidified and snapped, and flew asunder. In its place leaped something electric, which played from the people to the speaker who came first to his place, and from him back to the people. This man began to speak slowly. He was slow-moving, slow of eyelid and of glance, and his words came half sleepily. It was so that he told them about themselves: Children of those who had come to America for escape, for retreat, for a place of self-expression. Who had sought liberty, free schools, manhood suffrage, womanhood suffrage, religious freedom, and had found some of these and were seeking more. Picture by picture he showed them a country which, save for its enduring era of industrial babyhood, and its political and judicial error, gave them richly of what they had sought, developed them, fed them, comforted them. A place of plenty, a happy paradise, a walled world, he pictured theirs.