The speaker paused, and into the little gap of silence barked a voice from the gallery.

“That’s what you say.  But supposin’ they don’t do it?”

Loring was gazing steadfastly at the blank, heavy face, so utterly devoid of the enthusiasm the man was evoking in others.  For one flitting instant he thought he saw behind the mask.  The immobile face, the awkward gestures, the slipshod English became suddenly transparent, revealing the real man; a man of titanic strength, of tremendous possibilities for good or evil.  Loring put up his glasses and looked again; but the figure of the flash-light inner vision had vanished, and the speaker was answering his objector as calmly as though the house held only the single critic to be set right.

“I’m always glad to hear a man speak right out in meeting,” he said, dropping still deeper into the colloquialisms.  “Supposing the corporations don’t see the handwriting on the wall—­won’t see it, you say?  Then, my friend, it will become the manifest duty of the legislature and the executive to make ’em see it:  always lawfully, you understand; always with a just and equitable respect for the rights of property in which our free and glorious institutions are founded, but with level-handed justice, and without fear or favor.”

A thunderous uproar of applause clamored on the heels of the answer, and the Honorable Jasper mopped his face with a colored handkerchief and took a swallow of water from the glass on the desk.

“Mind you, my friends, I’m not saying we are not going to find plenty of stumps and roots and a tough sod in this furrow we are going to plow.  It’s only the fool or the ignoramus who underrates the strength of his opponent.  It is going to be just plain, honest justice and the will of the people against the money of the Harrimans and the Goulds and the Vanderbilts and all the rest of ’em.  But the law is mighty, and it will prevail.  Give us an honest legislature to make such laws, and an executive strong enough to enforce ’em, and the sovereign State will stand out glorious and triumphant as a monument against oppression.

“When that time comes—­and it’s a-coming, my friends—­the corporations and the syndicates will read the handwriting on the wall; don’t you be afraid of that.  If they should be a little grain thick-headed and sort o’ blind at first, as old King Belshazzar was, it may be that the sovereign State will have to give ’em an object-lesson—­lawfully, always lawfully, you understand.  But when they see, through the medium of such an object-lesson or otherwise, as the case may be, that we mean business; when they see that we, the people of this great and growing commonwealth, mean to assert our rights to live and move and have our being, to have fair, even-handed justice meted out to ourselves, our wives and our little children, they’ll come down and quit watering their stock with the sweat of our brows; and that hold-up motto of theirs, ‘All the tariff the traffic will stand,’ will be no more known in Israel!”