The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar.  Of course I don’t like the crowd, but what’s a poor chap to do?  We can’t have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule.  But come on, anyway.  I’m loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I’ll get drunk.  And you know the doctor says—­damn the doctor!  I’ll fool him yet.”

It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class.  The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin’s admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism.  The man’s stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time.  To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol.  He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life.  They were the unfit.  In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man.  Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best.  It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and cucumbers.  Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method.  Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos.

So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell.  He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman.  He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking.  In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin’s five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed.  He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin’s time.  They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word.  He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question.  He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development.