Bob Brownley strode to the place just vacated by the president.  The crowd was growing larger every minute.  The ticker was already hissing a tape biograph of this extraordinary situation in brokerage shops, hotels, and banks throughout the country, and in a few minutes the news of it would be in the capitals of Europe.  Never before in history did man have such an audience—­the whole civilised world.  Already arose from Wall, Broad, and New Streets, which surround the Exchange, the hoarse bellow of the gathering hordes.  Before the ticker should announce the resumption of business these would number hundreds of thousands, for the financial district for more than an hour had been a surging mob.

For once at least the much-abused phrase, “He looked the part,” could be used in all truthfulness.  As Robert Brownley threw back his head and shoulders and faced that crowd of men, some of whom he had hurt, many of whom he had beggared, and all of whom he had tortured, he presented a picture such as a royal lion recently from the jungles and just freed from his cage might have made.  Defiance, deference, contempt, and pity all blended in his mien, but over all was an I-am-the-one-you-are-the-many atmosphere of confidence that turned my spinal column into a mercury tube.  He began to speak: 

“Men of Wall Street: 

“You have just witnessed a record-breaking slaughter.  I have asked permission to talk to you for the purpose of showing you how any member of a great Stock Exchange may at any time do what I have done to-day.  Weigh well what I am about to say to you.  During the last quarter of a century there has grown up in this free and fair land of ours a system by which the few take from the many the results of their labours.  The men who take have no more license, from God or man, to take, than have those from whom they filch.  They are not endowed by God with superior wisdom, nor have they performed for their fellow-men any labour or given to them anything of value that entitles them to what they take.  Their only license to plunder is their knowledge of the system of trickery and fraud that they themselves have created.  No man can gainsay this, for on every side is the evidence.  Men come into Wall Street at sunrise without dollars; before that same sun sets they depart with millions.  So all-powerful has grown the system of oppression that single men take in a single lifetime all the savings of a million of their fellows.  To-day the people, eighty millions strong, are slaving for the few, and their pay is their board and keep.  I saw this robbery.  I felt the robbers’ scourge.  I sought the secret.  I found it here, here in this gambling-hell.  I found that the stocks we bought and sold were mere gambling chips; that the man who had the biggest stack could beat his opponent off the board; that his opponent was the world, because all men directly or indirectly played the stock-gambling game.  To win, it was but necessary