I then went down the track to investigate. Within a hundred yards, the person stopped and raised his hand.
"Jefson," was all he said.
It was Wilbrid!—but old, careworn, and almost out of breath.
"Why this change?" I asked, as I came up to him and we moved to a seat at the side of the track.
"I'm down and out," he said. "My mission failed." And his chin sank upon the top of the hand-clasped stick. "The crowd did not understand. You know that I began to preach the doctrine of the Humanist to help the masses to come into their own. You know we won upon the wave of reaction that followed the war. We should have stayed at that level and moved along, but the momentum was too great, the pendulum had swung too far; for when the masses ruled they sinned worse than the party they supplanted. They became more bitter autocrats than the rulers we suppressed.
"Instead of 'Justice for the People,' it was 'Brute Strength for the Mob.'
"I could not stem the flood that I had let loose. Heaven only knows how hard I tried, for when I pleaded that a moderate track be taken, the mob insisted that I sought a place to dominate, and put me in the rut.
"To-day they fear no law of man or God. To-day their self-satisfaction has made them indifferent to anything that elevates. I had led them into a morass, and deeper in the mire have they rushed!"
He sat silent and watched the shadows creeping along the river.
"And what now?" I asked.