“When I was a small kid I used to live by the seashore,” said the old man presently in his dry, emphatic tones.  “Many is the time I’ve stood and watched the tide coming in, and I never once saw it come in that it didn’t go out again.”

“Then you believe that the tide is turning against Vetch?”

For a minute, while they sped on in the obscurity of a side street, Darrow meditated.

“No, sir, I ain’t saying that much—­not yet.  But the way I calculate is something like this.  Vetch came in on a wave of popular emotion, and a wave of popular emotion is just about like the tide of the sea.  It may rise a certain distance, but it can’t stand still, and it can’t go any farther.  It’s obliged to turn; and when it turns, it’s pretty sure to bring back a good deal that it carried with it.  A crowd impulse—­as they call it in the pulpit and on the platform—­is a dangerous thing.  It’s dangerous because you can’t count on it.”

“It looks to me as if Vetch counted upon it a little too much.”

“That’s his nature.  He was born on the sunny side of the street.  He thinks because he sees the way to help people that they want to be helped.  I’ve been mixed up in politics now for fifty years, and in the labour movement, as they say, ever since it began to move in the South—­and I’ve found out that people don’t really want to be helped—­they want to be fooled.  Vetch offers ’em facts, and all the time it ain’t facts they’re wanting, but names.”

“I see,” assented Stephen.  “Names that they can repeat over and over until they get at last to believe that they are things.  Long reverberating names like Democratic or Republican—­”

Darrow laughed grimly.  “That’s right, sir, that’s the way I’ve worked it out in my mind.  The crowd will come a little way after a fact; but in the end it gets tired because the fact won’t work magic, like that conjure-stuff of the darkeys, and then it turns and goes back to the old names that mean nothing.  Only when a crowd moves all together it’s dangerous because it’s like the flood-tide and ebb-tide of the sea.”

“And the most irritating part of it,” said Stephen, with an insight which had sometimes visited him in the trenches, “is that it gets what it deserves because it can always have whatever it wants—­even the truth and honest government.”

They were passing rows of narrow old-fashioned tenement-houses, standing, like crumbling walls of red brick, behind sagging wooden fences; and suddenly, while Stephen’s eyes were on the lights that came and went so fitfully in the basement dining-rooms, Darrow stopped the car in the gutter of cobblestones, and motioned in silence toward the pavement.  As Stephen got out, he glanced vaguely round him at the strange neighbourhood.

“Where are we?”