“My brothers,” he said in Yiddish, when his turn came to speak.  “It pains me much to note how disunited we are.  The capitalists, the Belcovitches, would rejoice if they but knew all that is going on.  Have we not enemies enough that we must quarrel and split up into little factions among ourselves? (Hear, hear.) How can we hope to succeed unless we are thoroughly organized?  It has come to my ears that there are men who insinuate things even about me and before I go on further to-night I wish to put this question to you.”  He paused and there was a breathless silence.  The orator threw his chest forwards and gazing fearlessly at the assembly cried in a stentorian voice: 

"Sind sie zufrieden mit ihrer Chairman?" (Are you satisfied with your chairman?)

His audacity made an impression.  The discontented cowered timidly in their places.

“Yes,” rolled back from the assembly, proud of its English monosyllables.

“Nein,” cried a solitary voice from the topmost gallery.

Instantly the assembly was on its legs, eyeing the dissentient angrily.  “Get down!  Go on the platform!” mingled with cries of “order” from the Chairman, who in vain summoned him on to the stage.  The dissentient waved a roll of paper violently and refused to modify his standpoint.  He was evidently speaking, for his jaws were making movements, which in the din and uproar could not rise above grimaces.  There was a battered high hat on the back of his head, and his hair was uncombed, and his face unwashed.  At last silence was restored and the tirade became audible.

“Cursed sweaters—­capitalists—­stealing men’s brains—­leaving us to rot and starve in darkness and filth.  Curse them!  Curse them!” The speaker’s voice rose to a hysterical scream, as he rambled on.

Some of the men knew him and soon there flew from lip to lip, “Oh, it’s only Meshuggene David.”

Mad Davy was a gifted Russian university student, who had been mixed up with nihilistic conspiracies and had fled to England where the struggle to find employ for his clerical talents had addled his brain.  He had a gift for chess and mechanical invention, and in the early days had saved himself from starvation by the sale of some ingenious patents to a swaggering co-religionist who owned race-horses and a music-hall, but he sank into squaring the circle and inventing perpetual motion.  He lived now on the casual crumbs of indigent neighbors, for the charitable organizations had marked him “dangerous.”  He was a man of infinite loquacity, with an intense jealousy of Simon Wolf or any such uninstructed person who assumed to lead the populace, but when the assembly accorded him his hearing he forgot the occasion of his rising in a burst of passionate invective against society.

When the irrelevancy of his remarks became apparent, he was rudely howled down and his neighbors pulled him into his seat, where he gibbered and mowed inaudibly.