"Do you mean to deny," he began hotly, "that brains are born to what you call the lowest classes? Do you deny the divine spark of intelligence to the sons of toil? Do you say that genius is sent to the houses of the rich and not to those of the poor? Do you dare to say that the son of a banker may have brains and that the son of a hodman may not?" "By no means, my dear fellow. I only say if he has brains he won’t be a hodman." "I’ve known some pretty smart hodmen in my time," said Clark, when he saw that Parks had no answer ready. "I knew a fellow who made four hundred dollars on a contract. But," he added regretfully, "he lost it in stocks." "I’m afraid that instance doesn’t prove anything, Clark," said Merwin with a thin laugh. "He should have had brains enough to keep out of stocks." "There’s not many as has that," said a heavy-jowled Englishman who sat across the table. "I wish I had ’em myself." "I’m afraid you’re right, Mr. Hampden," said Clark. "We can’t get a leader from the hodman class." Parks leaned forward and spoke quietly and impressively. "By God, we must!" he said. "_I’ll_ be the brains. I’ll find the hodman for the mouth, and I’ll teach him to talk in a way to set the world on fire." "And then what?" I asked. Parks gave his head a shake, and closed his lips tightly as though he feared that some secret would escape them. But the excitable little German with spectacles and a bushy black beard gave me an answer. "Leeberty, equality, fraternity!" he exclaimed. "And justice," added the heavy-jowled Englishman. "These are words, and very good ones," I returned. "But what do you mean by them? You have these things now, or you don’t have them--just as you happen to look at it. It usually depends on whether you are successful or not. What does all this mean in action?" "For one thing," said the square-jawed man seriously, "it means an end of the sort of robbery by law that our friend Merwin here has suffered. Now, twenty years ago he was a prosperous contractor. He took a lot of contracts from old Peter Bolton for filling in some of these water-front blocks down here. He spent two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, d’ye know, and has been lawing for it ever since." I turned and looked at the face of the old man with more interest. The case of Merwin against Bolton was celebrated in the law books. It was now before the Supreme Court for the sixth time. In the trial court the juries had invariably found for Merwin with costs and interest, and the appellate court had as invariably sent the case back for retrial on errors committed by the lower court, until it had become an impersonal issue, a jest of the law, a legal ghost, almost as far removed from affairs of to-day as "Shelley’s case" of unblessed memory. Merwin looked up quickly, the dreamy gaze no longer clouding his eye.