For himself, the young man reflected now, he had always thought otherwise. It was a period, he felt, of humbug radicalism, of windbag eloquence; yet he possessed both wit and discernment enough to see that, though ideas might explode in empty talk, still it took ideas to make the sort of explosion that was deafening one's ears. All the flat formula of the centuries could not produce a single Gideon Vetch. Such men were part of the changing world; they answered not to reasoned argument, but to the loud crash of breaking idols. Stephen hated Vetch with all his heart, but he acknowledged him. He did not try to evade the man's tremendous veracity, his integrity of being, his inevitableness. An inherent intellectual honesty compelled Stephen to admit that, "the demagogue", as he called him, had his appropriate place in the age that produced him--that he existed rather as an outlet for political tendencies than as the product of international violence. He was more than a theatrical attitude--a torrent of words. Even a free country--and Stephen thought sentimentally of America as "a free country"--must have its tyrannies of opinion, and consequently its rebels against current convictions. In the older countries he had imagined that it might be possible to hold with the hare and run with the hounds; but in the land of opportunity for all there was less reason to be astonished when the hunted turned at last into the hunter. Where every boy was taught that he might some day be President, why should one stand amazed when the ambitious son of a circus rider became Governor of Virginia? After all, a fair field and no favours was the best that the most conservative of politicians--the best that even John Benham could ask. Yes, there was a cause, there was a reason for the miracle of disorder, or it would not have happened. The hour had called forth the man; but the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with his ear to the wind. It had been a triumph of personality, one of those rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time come together. This the young man admitted candidly in the very moment when he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all his works. A man who consistently made his bid for the support of the radical element! Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he could harness them to his chariot! A man who was born in a circus tent, and who still performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this man had power, Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined, the half-educated, the mentally untrained. It was power, as John Benham had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over empty stomachs.