The Way of the Strong

by Ridgwell Cullum

There were colored Pullman servants, and waiters, and cooks from the dining-cars. There were plate-layers in their blue overalls, and machinists from the round-house. So, too, was the depot department represented. It was a great gathering of all grades of railroad workers on the Calford section of the system.

The benches were crowded right up to the narrow platform, upon which a group of four men, evidently workers like the audience, were seated behind a tall youth, with thick, fair hair and enormous breadth of shoulder. He was standing out alone. He was talking rapidly in a deep, resonant voice which carried distinctly to the remotest corners of the building. His face was flushed, and his blue eyes were alight with earnestness for the subject of his address.

Point after point he was striving to drive home by the sheer force of his own convictions. There was no display about him. There was none of the pathetic humor, or the unconsciously humorous pathos of the ordinary demagogue. He was preaching the gospel of equality, as he saw it, judiciously tempered to meet with the requirements of the society to which his audience belonged, and which he, for the moment, represented.

He talked well. Extremely well. And his audience listened. Frequently his sentences were punctuated by approving "hear, hears," in many directions. But there was none of that explosive approval which is as nectar to the ordinary demagogue.

To one man, sitting in the back of the hall, a man nearly as large as the speaker, though older, enveloped in a rough suit, which, while matching the tone of the rest of the audience, sat ill upon him, it seemed that the speaker lacked something with which to carry his audience.

He listened attentively, he followed every word, seeking to discover the nature of this lack. It was not easy to detect. Yet he was sure of its existence. Nor was it till the evening was half spent that he quietly registered the fact that this man missed one great essential to win his way to the hearts of these people. He was not one of them. He only understood their lives through immature observation. He had never lived their life.

Somehow the conviction left him satisfied, and he settled himself more comfortably upon his uncomfortable bench.

Later on he became aware of a sense of restlessness running through the hall. There was a definite clearing of throats among the audience. There was a good deal of shifting of positions. He even observed the inclination of heads toward each other, which told him that whispered conversations were going on about him. To him this meant a waning interest in the speaker. Doubt was no longer in his mind, but now his satisfaction became touched with regret.

Now he knew this man was not brutal enough. He was not coarse enough. He did not know the hearts of these men sufficiently. His mind was far too ideal, and his talk further lacked in its appeal to self.

To hold these men he must come down to definite promises of obtaining for them, and bestowing upon them, the fulfilment of desires they were incapable of satisfying for themselves. It was the old story of satisfied men made dissatisfied, and now they required the promise of satisfaction for appetites suddenly rendered sharp-set.