"That's his nature. He was born on the sunny side of the street. He thinks because he sees the way to help people that they want to be helped. I've been mixed up in politics now for fifty years, and in the labour movement, as they say, ever since it began to move in the South—and I've found out that people don't really want to be helped—they want to be fooled. Vetch offers 'em facts, and all the time it ain't facts they're wanting, but names."
"I see," assented Stephen. "Names that they can repeat over and over until they get at last to believe that they are things. Long reverberating names like Democratic or Republican—"
Darrow laughed grimly. "That's right, sir, that's the way I've worked it out in my mind. The crowd will come a little way after a fact; but in the end it gets tired because the fact won't work magic, like that conjure-stuff of the darkeys, and then it turns and goes back to the old names that mean nothing. Only when a crowd moves all together it's dangerous because it's like the flood-tide and ebb-tide of the sea."
"And the most irritating part of it," said Stephen, with an insight which had sometimes visited him in the trenches, "is that it gets what it deserves because it can always have whatever it wants—even the truth and honest government."
They were passing rows of narrow old-fashioned tenement-houses, standing, like crumbling walls of red brick, behind sagging wooden fences; and suddenly, while Stephen's eyes were on the lights that came and went so fitfully in the basement dining-rooms, Darrow stopped the car in the gutter of cobblestones, and motioned in silence toward the pavement. As Stephen got out, he glanced vaguely round him at the strange neighbourhood.
"Where are we?"
"North of Marshall Street. A quarter which was once very prosperous; but that was before your day. This is one of several rows of old houses, well-built in their time, better built, indeed, than any houses we're putting up now; but their day is over. The cost of repairing them would be so great that the agent is deliberately letting the property run down in the hope that this part of the street will soon be turned over to negroes. The negroes are so crowded in their quarter that they are obliged to expand, and when they do, this investment will yield a still higher interest. Coloured tenants stand crowding better than white ones, and they will pay a better rent for worse housing. As it is the rent of these houses has doubled since the beginning of the war."
"Good God!" said Stephen. "Do we stop here?"
"I want you to see Canning, the man the Governor told you about. He can't pay his rent, which was raised last Saturday, and the family is moving to-morrow."
"He ought to be paid for living here. Where will he go?"