“How many do you think?”

She hesitated.

“It isn’t a very large hall, you know.  I should say it would hold about eight hundred people.”

“And—­it was full?”—­I persisted.

“Oh, yes, there were numbers of people standing.”

I thought I detected in her tone-although it was not apologetic—­a desire to spare my feelings.  She hesitated a moment more, and then left the room, closing the door softly behind her...

Presently I took up the pages and began to read.  The language was simple and direct, an appeal to common sense, yet the words strangely seemed charged with an emotional power that I found myself resisting.  When at length I laid down the sheets I wondered whether it were imagination, or the uncomfortable result of memories of conversations I had had with him.

I was, however, confronted with the task of refuting his arguments:  but with exasperating ingenuity, he seemed to have taken the wind out of our sails.  It is difficult to answer a man who denies the cardinal principle of American democracy,—­that a good mayor or a governor may be made out of a dog-catcher.  He called this the Cincinnatus theory:  that any American, because he was an American, was fit for any job in the gift of state or city or government, from sheriff to Ambassador to Great Britain.  Krebs substituted for this fallacy what may be called the doctrine of potentiality.  If we inaugurated and developed a system of democratic education, based on scientific principles, and caught the dog-catcher, young enough, he might become a statesman or thinker or scientist and make his contribution to the welfare and progress of the nation:  again, he might not; but he would have had his chance, he would not be in a position to complain.

Here was a doctrine, I immediately perceived, which it would be suicidal to attempt to refute.  It ought, indeed, to have been my line.  With a growing distaste I began to realize that all there was left for me was to flatter a populace that Krebs, paradoxically, belaboured.  Never in the history of American “uplift” had an electorate been in this manner wooed! upbraided for expediency, a proneness to demand immediate results, an unwillingness to think, yes, and an inability to think straight.  Such an electorate deserved to be led around by the nose by the Jasons and Dickinsons, the Gorses and the Griersons and the Parets.

Yes, he had mentioned me.  That gave me a queer sensation.  How is one to handle an opponent who praises one with a delightful irony?  We, the Dickinsons, Griersons, Parets, Jasons, etc., had this virtue at least, and it was by no means the least of the virtues,—­that we did think.  We had a plan, a theory of government, and we carried it out.  He was inclined to believe that morality consisted largely, if not wholly, in clear thinking, and not in the precepts of the Sunday-school.  That was the trouble with the so-called “reform”