Mr. Cowes is unopposed.  After the preceding enthusiast, the voice of Mr. Cowes falls soothingly as a stream among the heather.  He is tall, meagre, bald; he wears a very broad black necktie, his hand saws up and down.  Mr. Cowes’ tone is the quietly venomous; in a few minutes you believe in his indignation far more than in that of Mr. Cullen.  He makes a point and pauses to observe the effect upon his hearers.  He prides himself upon his grammar, goes back to correct a concord, emphasises eccentricities of pronunciation; for instance, he accents ‘capitalist’ on the second syllable, and repeats the words with grave challenge to all and sundry.  Speaking of something which he wishes to stigmatise as a misnomer, he exclaims:  ’It’s what I call a misnomy!’ And he follows the assertion with an awful suspense of utterance.  He brings his speech to a close exactly with the end of the tenth minute, and, on sitting down, eyes his unknown neighbour with wrathful intensity for several moments.

Who will follow?  A sound comes from the very back of the room, such a sound that every head turns in astonished search for the source of it.  Such voice has the wind in garret-chimneys on a winter night.  It is a thin wail, a prelude of lamentation; it troubles the blood.  The speaker no one seems to know; he is a man of yellow visage, with head sunk between pointed shoulders, on his crown a mere scalp-lock.  He seems to be afflicted with a disease of the muscles; his malformed body quivers, the hand he raises shakes paralytic.  His clothes are of the meanest; what his age may be it is impossible to judge.  As his voice gathers strength, the hearers begin to feel the influence of a terrible earnestness.  He does not rant, he does not weigh his phrases; the stream of bitter prophecy flows on smooth and dark.  He is supplying the omission in Mutimer’s harangue, is bidding his class know itself and chasten itself, as an indispensable preliminary to any great change in the order of things.  He cries vanity upon all these detailed schemes of social reconstruction.  Are we ready for it? he wails.  Could we bear it, if they granted it to us?  It is all good and right, but hadn’t we better first make ourselves worthy of such freedom?  He begins a terrible arraignment of the People,—­then, of a sudden, his voice has ceased.  You could hear a pin drop.  It is seen that the man has fallen to the ground; there arises a low moaning; people press about him.

They carry him into the coffee-shop.  It was a fit.  In five minutes he is restored, but does not come back to finish his speech.

There is an interval of disorder.  But surely we are not going to let the meeting end in this way.  The chairman calls for the next speaker, and he stands forth in the person of a rather smug little shopkeeper, who declares that he knows of no single particular in which the working class needs correction.  The speech undeniably falls fiat.  Will no one restore the tone of the meeting?