The first part of his address was simply a narrative. In a calm, unimpassioned way he told his hearers the story, from its beginning, of a struggle for freedom; he told them how a movement which had begun in a spirit of love, enthusiasm, and self-sacrifice, had been turned by blind tyranny and brutal oppression into one of wild vengeance and bitter relentless hatred. He told them how, for a chance expression of sympathy with the down-trodden peasants; for the possession of a suppressed book; sometimes even for less than these offences, for having incurred the personal spite of some members of the police, aged men and tender girls had been, and were, at that moment while he spoke to them, being delivered over to the torture chambers of the Russian monarch, to be scourged and starved, to be devoured by disease and riven by madness. He told them how tyranny always had treated--how while it exists, tyranny always will treat the sons of men. Then, when many among his audience had broken out into groans of indignation and cries of 'Shame!' the usual note of an indignant English audience, the speaker dropped the narrative tone and became argumentative. Here, when he justified the Nihilists' 'deeds of death' as the lawful punishment of criminals--punishment inflicted by the only power that has the right to execute vengeance, the outraged spirit of man--he seemed to lose for a moment the sympathy of some of his hearers, and certainly of the Ferriers, who like most Englishmen, believed in the efficacy of Parliamentary reforms, and also forgot, like most Englishmen, that these patent remedies for all the ills of life are hardly applicable to nations that have no parliament. With the ready apprehension of a true orator, Litvinoff saw the slight shade of coldness as it passed over some of the upturned faces before him, and, with a consummate skill that was the result either of long practice or oratorical genius, he changed, without seeming to change, the argumentative and defensive attitude for one of stern and glowing denunciation. His voice rang through the room now like a trumpet-call. A very little of this sort of thing was sufficient to rouse the men before him to stormy approbation, and Richard whispered to his brother that if any Russian dignitary were to come in just then, while the speaker was in the full tide of his invective, he would have very much the sort of reception that was given to the Austrian woman-flogging general some years ago by the stalwart draymen of Messrs Barclay & Perkins.