But for the masterly qualities of the Leader, who held the meeting to strict parliamentary order, it might have degenerated into a mob. Men were crowding one another in their desire to gain the floor, but not for a moment was the peaceful conduct of the gathering disturbed. With accurate knowledge of the shades of social belief there represented and of the personalities of the men, the Leader chose for recognition with discriminating justice. At one moment an American workman was speaking, a Socialist of the general school of Social Democracy. There was self-respecting dignity about him and a calm reserve as he began. The Christian Church served as well as any institution of the capitalistic order, he said, to measure the growing cleavage between the classes in society. But, to his mind, the paper of the afternoon had emphasized unnecessarily the existence of the _bourgeoisie_; for, economically considered, there is no longer a middle-class to be reckoned with in vital questions. There remain simply the capitalists and the proletarians. The old middle-class, which had made its living by individual enterprise, was fast being forced (by the play of natural laws, which showed themselves in the increasing centralization of capital) out of the possibility of successful competition with aggregated wealth, and down, for the most part, to the level of those who can bring to production, not land nor capital, but merely their native qualities of physical strength, or manual skill, or mental ability--proletarians, all of them, whether manual or intellectual, and coming surely, in the slow development of evolution, to a conscious knowledge of their community of interest as against the vested “rights” of monopoly in the material instruments of production. But athwart this path of progress rose the hardened structure of the Christian Church, bringing to bear against it all her temporal power and the full force of her accumulated superstitions. But now the speaker’s calm deserted him, and, with fist uplifted in threatening gesture, and his strong, bronzed face working with the fervor of his hate, he cried out against the ministers of Christ, who preach to the wronged and downtrodden poor the duty of patience with their “divinely appointed lot,” and who try to soothe them to blind submission with promises of an endless future of ecstatic blessedness, when the rich of this world shall burn in the unquenchable fires of hell. [Illustration: THE SOCIALIST MEETING.]