"A man stands only for what he is, not for an inch more, not for an inch less. The trouble with all the leaders we've had in the past was that their thought outstripped their characters. They believed more than they were and they broke down under it. I'm an old man now. I've watched them come and go."
"You think that Vetch is a great leader?"
"I think he is a great leader, but I don't mean that I think he will ever lead us anywhere."
"You feel that he is losing his grip on the crowd?"
Up from Main Street the workers were pouring out of the factories; and while they moved in a dark stream through the light and shadow on the pavement, the faces flowed past Stephen with a pallid intensity which made him think of dead flowers drifting on a river. In all those faces how little life there seemed, how little individuality and animation!
"When I was a small kid I used to live by the seashore," said the old man presently in his dry, emphatic tones. "Many is the time I've stood and watched the tide coming in, and I never once saw it come in that it didn't go out again."
"Then you believe that the tide is turning against Vetch?"
For a minute, while they sped on in the obscurity of a side street, Darrow meditated.
"No, sir, I ain't saying that much—not yet. But the way I calculate is something like this. Vetch came in on a wave of popular emotion, and a wave of popular emotion is just about like the tide of the sea. It may rise a certain distance, but it can't stand still, and it can't go any farther. It's obliged to turn; and when it turns, it's pretty sure to bring back a good deal that it carried with it. A crowd impulse—as they call it in the pulpit and on the platform—is a dangerous thing. It's dangerous because you can't count on it."
"It looks to me as if Vetch counted upon it a little too much."