He was not a good speaker, in the conventional sense, he fumbled for words, and repeated himself--and yet from his first sentence Thyrsis found himself listening spellbound. The voice went through him like the toll of a bell; never in all his life had he heard a speaker who put such a burden of anguish into his words--who gave such a sense of gigantic issues, of age-long destinies hanging in the balance, of world-embracing hopes and powers struggling to be born. Here was a prophet who carried in his soul the future of the race; who in the sudden flashes of his vision, in the swift rushes of his passionate pleadings, evoked from the deeps of the consciousness forces that one contemplated with terror--confronted one with martyrdoms and agonies and despairs. “Revolution” was his title; he pictured modern civilization as it presented itself to the proletarian man--a gigantic Moloch, to which human lives were fed, a monster from whose dominion there was no deliverance, even in the uttermost parts of the earth. He pictured accident, disease and death, unemployment and starvation, child-labor, prostitution, war; he was the voice of the dispossessed of the earth, the man beneath the machine, ground up body, mind and soul in this “world-wide mill of economic might”. And he showed how this man dragged down with him all society; how the chain that bound the slave was fastened also to the master--so that from the poverty and oppression and degradation of this “downmost man” came all the ulcers that festered in the social body. He saw the great economic machine grinding on day and night, the mighty forces rushing to their culmination. He saw the toiling millions pressed deeper and deeper into the mire; he saw their blind, convulsive struggles for deliverance; he saw over them the gigantic slave-driver with his thousand-lashed whip--the capitalist state, class-owned class-administered--backed by the capitalist church and the capitalist press and capitalist “public sentiment”. So the hopes of the people went down in blood and reaction sat enthroned. The nations, ridden by despotisms, and whirled into senseless wars, ran the old course of militarism, imperialism, barbarism; and so civilization slid back yet again into the melting-pot! Thyrsis had never heard such a speech as this in his life. When it was over, he went up to the platform where Darrell sat, looking more exhausted and pain-driven than ever; and in a few hesitating words he told of his interest, and asked for the speaker’s address, that he might write to him. And that night he posted a letter, introducing himself as a young writer, who felt impelled to learn more about Darrell’s ideas. In reply came a note from the other, asking him to dine with him; and Thyrsis answered accepting. Then, as chance would have it, he mentioned the circumstance to his mother. “Darrell!” she cried. “You don’t mean Henry Darrell!” “Yes,” said Thyrsis. “Why?” “And you would meet that man?”