He waited, motionless and scornful, for the noise to die down.  “Since I have come here to Hampton, I have heard some speak of the state, others of the unions.  Yet the state is your enemy, it will not help you to gain your freedom.  The legislature has shortened your hours,—­but why?  Because the politicians are afraid of you, and because they think you will be content with a little.  And now that the masters have cut your wages, the state sends its soldiers to crush you.  Only fifty cents, they say—­only fifty cents most of you miss from your envelopes.  What is fifty cents to them?  But I who speak to you have been hungry, I know that fifty cents will buy ten loaves of bread, or three pounds of the neck of pork, or six quarts of milk for the babies.  Fifty cents will help pay the rent of the rat-holes where you live.”  Once more he was interrupted by angry shouts of approval.  “And the labour unions, have they aided you?  Why not?  I will tell you why—­because they are the servile instruments of the masters.  The unions say that capital has rights, bargain with it, but for us there can be only one bargain, complete surrender of the tools to the workers.  For the capitalists are parasites who suck your blood and your children’s blood.  From now on there can be no compromise, no truce, no peace until they are exterminated.  It is war.”  War!  In Janet’s soul the word resounded like a tocsin.  And again, as when swept along East Street with the mob, that sense of identity with these people and their wrongs, of submergence with them in their cause possessed her.  Despite her ancestry, her lot was cast with them.  She, too, had been precariously close to poverty, had known the sordidness of life; she, too, and Lise and Hannah had been duped and cheated of the fairer things.  Eagerly she had drunk in the vocabulary of that new and terrible philosophy.  The master class must be exterminated!  Was it not true, if she had been of that class, that Ditmar would not have dared to use and deceive her?  Why had she never thought of these things before?...  The light was beginning to fade, the great meeting was breaking up, and yet she lingered.  At the foot of the bandstand steps, conversing with a small group of operatives that surrounded him, she perceived the man who had just spoken.  And as she stood hesitating, gazing at him, a desire to hear more, to hear all of this creed he preached, that fed the fires in her soul, urged her forward.  Her need, had she known it, was even greater than that of these toilers whom she now called comrades.  Despite some qualifying reserve she felt, and which had had to do with the redness of his lips, he attracted her.  He had a mind, an intellect, he must possess stores of the knowledge for which she thirsted; he appeared to her as one who had studied and travelled, who had ascended heights and gained the wider view denied her.  A cynical cosmopolitanism would have left her cold, but here, apparently, was a cultivated man burning