t
wonder if he had.« Here sounded a roar of laughter, led off by Daniel Dabbs.
»Hows'ever, be that as it may, we can answer for it as any views he may hold is
the right views, and the honest views, and the views of a man as means to do a
good deal more than talk about his convictions!«
    Again did the stentor-note of Daniel ring forth, and it was amid thunderous
cheering that Richard left his chair and moved to the front of the platform. His
Sunday suit of black was still that with which his friends were familiar, but
his manner, though the audience probably did not perceive the detail, was
unmistakably changed. He had been wont to begin his address with short, stinging
periods, with sneers and such bitterness of irony as came within his compass.
To-night he struck quite another key, mellow, confident, hinting at personal
satisfaction; a smile was on his lips, and not a smile of scorn. He rested one
hand against his side, holding in the other a scrap of paper with jotted items
of reasoning. His head was thrown a little back; he viewed the benches from
beneath his eyelids. True, the pose maintained itself but for a moment. I
mention it because it was something new in Richard.
    He spoke of the land; he attacked the old monopoly, and visioned a time when
a claim to individual ownerships of the earth's surface would be as ludicrous as
were now the assertion of title to a fee-simple somewhere in the moon. He
mustered statistics; he adduced historic and contemporary example of the just
and the unjust in land-holding; he gripped the throat of a certain English duke,
and held him up for flagellation; he drifted into oceans of economic theory; he
sat down by the waters of Babylon; he climbed Pisgah. Had he but spoken of
backslidings in the wilderness! But for that fatal omission, the lecture was, of
its kind, good. By degrees Richard forgot his pose and the carefully struck note
of mellowness; he began to believe what he was saying, and to say it with the
right vigour of popular oratory. Forget his struggles with the h-fiend; forget
his syntactical lapses; you saw that after all the man had within him a clear
flame of conscience; that he had felt before speaking that speech was one of the
uses for which Nature had expressly framed him. His invective seldom degenerated
into vulgar abuse; one discerned in him at least the elements of what we call
good taste;
