"Cursed sweaters—capitalists—stealing men's brains—leaving us to rot and starve in darkness and filth. Curse them! Curse them!" The speaker's voice rose to a hysterical scream, as he rambled on.
Some of the men knew him and soon there flew from lip to lip, "Oh, it's only Meshuggene David."
Mad Davy was a gifted Russian university student, who had been mixed up with nihilistic conspiracies and had fled to England where the struggle to find employ for his clerical talents had addled his brain. He had a gift for chess and mechanical invention, and in the early days had saved himself from starvation by the sale of some ingenious patents to a swaggering co-religionist who owned race-horses and a music-hall, but he sank into squaring the circle and inventing perpetual motion. He lived now on the casual crumbs of indigent neighbors, for the charitable organizations had marked him "dangerous." He was a man of infinite loquacity, with an intense jealousy of Simon Wolf or any such uninstructed person who assumed to lead the populace, but when the assembly accorded him his hearing he forgot the occasion of his rising in a burst of passionate invective against society.
When the irrelevancy of his remarks became apparent, he was rudely howled down and his neighbors pulled him into his seat, where he gibbered and mowed inaudibly.
Wolf continued his address.
"Sind sie zufrieden mit ihrer Secretary?"
This time there was no dissent. The "Yes" came like thunder.
"Sind sie zufrieden mit ihrer Treasurer?"
Yeas and nays mingled. The question of the retention, of the functionary was put to the vote. But there was much confusion, for the East-End Jew is only slowly becoming a political animal. The ayes had it, but Wolf was not yet satisfied with the satisfaction of the gathering. He repeated the entire batch of questions in a new formula so as to drive them home.
"Hot aner etwas zu sagen gegen mir?" Which is Yiddish for "has any one anything to say against me?"