"I don't think it wise," Stuart protested.
"I'm going, anyhow. Won't you accompany me?"
"If you will go—yes."
"That's a good boy. I'll send one of my cars to the office for you immediately."
An hour later when Stuart, seated by Nan's side, reached Union Square, the automobile was stopped by the police and turned into Seventeenth Street.
Every inch of space in the Square seemed blocked by a solid mass of motionless humanity. Stuart left the car in Seventeenth Street and succeeded finally in forcing a way through the crowd to a position within a hundred feet of the rude platform that had been erected for the orators. The scene about the stand bristled with policemen, most of them apparently picked men, their new uniforms glittering in the sun and their polished clubs flashing defiance as they twirled them in the faces of the people with deliberate provocation.
Besides the special detail of picked men who moved about the stand, occasionally clubbing an inoffensive man, a battalion of three hundred reserves was drawn up in serried lines about a hundred yards to the north on the edge of Fourth Avenue. Between these reserves and the crowd about the stand an open space was kept clear for their possible assault in case of any disturbance.
Near these reserves stood the big red automobile of Hamberger, the police captain of the District. He was reputed to be a millionaire, though his salary had never been more than enough to support his wife and children. The sight of his fat insolent face as the representative of Law and Order gave Stuart the impression of farce so irresistibly that he laughed. Surely some of Bivens's sinister philosophy to which he had listened yesterday had a pretty solid basis in the facts of our everyday life.
When the speaking began Stuart pressed his way as close as possible, drawing Nan with him.
He was astonished at the genuine eloquence and power with which the first speaker, evidently of anarchistic leanings, developed his theme, a passionate plea for freedom and the highest development of the individual man. He sketched the growth of the American Republic from its crude beginning in the unbroken forests, and showed with clear historic grasp how all the thinking and creative deeds which had added anything to the sum of human progress belonged to this period of anarchistic liberties. He traced the growth of tyranny in the development of our system of laws until to-day we were less free than the people of England, who lived under the hereditary king against whom our fathers had rebelled. A tyranny of corrupt and ignorant politicians he denounced as the lowest and vilest yet evolved in history.