“Gemesst im edeln Geistensaft
     Des Wemes Geist, des Brodes Kraft”

In the little anteroom a few sharp-looking, rather conceited young men were standing, either the instigators or organizers of the meeting.  They eyed the people who came in with a quick look of assurance, offering a pamphlet, which nearly every one bought.  Through this anteroom was the hall, large enough to hold a thousand people comfortably.  Several tables for beer stood between red-covered pillars which supported the ceiling, and on the right was a platform for the speakers.  Wilhelm, Schrotter, and Paul Haber found places not far from this, although the hall was soon filled up after they came in.

Wilhelm’s first impression was not favorable.  He had bought a pamphlet at the door, and in it he read foolish jokes, clumsy tirades against capitalists, and drearily silly verses.  If the party possessed quick and cultivated writers, they had certainly not been employed on this leaflet.  His finer senses were as shocked at the meeting as his taste was at the pamphlet.  Mingled odors of tobacco-smoke, beer, human breath, and damp clothes filled the air; the people at the tables had an indescribably common stamp, unlovely manners, harsh, loud voices, and unattractive faces.  They gossiped and laughed noisily, and coarse expressions were frequent.  The earnest moral tone, the almost gloomy melancholy which Wilhelm had found so attractive in socialistic writings, was absent, and it seemed to him as if the new doctrine in its removal from the enthusiast’s study to the beer-tables of the crowd had lost all nobility, and had sunk to degradation.

Paul took no trouble to conceal the disgust which “this dirty rabble” gave him.  He gazed contemptuously about him, and every time that one of his neighbors’ elbows came near his coat he brushed the place angrily, and muttered half-aloud: 

“Well, if I were the government I would jolly soon stop your meetings.”

Dr. Schrotter, on the other hand, found the sight of the crowd rekindle in him all the feeling of sentiment he had had for the old democrats; he felt his heart overflow with pity and tenderness.  With his physician’s eyes he pierced through the brutal physiognomies, and observed them with kindness and sympathy, making his friends attentive too.

“One of the martyrs of work,” he said gently, indicating a haggard man sitting at the next table who had lost one eye.

“How do you know that?”

“He must be a worker in metal, and has had a splinter in one of his eyes.  He had the injured eye removed to save the other.”