“What are you afraid of? You have nothing to fear except yourselves out here in the sunny open!
“Behold your enemies––yourselves!––selfish, defiant, full of false council, of envy, of cowardice, of treachery.
“For there would be no sorrow, no injustice in the world if we––each one of us––were true to our better selves! You know it! You can not come out of darkness and range the open world like wolves! Civilisation will kill you!
“But you can come out of your long twilight bearing yourselves like men––and find, by God’s grace, that you are men!––that you are fashioned like other men to stand upright in the light without blinking and slinking and dodging into cover.
“For the haymakers will not climb and stone you; the herds will not stampede; no watch-dogs of civilisation will attack you if you come out into the fields looking like men, behaving like men, asking to share the world’s burdens like men, and like men giving brain and brawn to make more pleasant and secure the only spot in the 359 solar system dedicated by the Most High to the development of mankind!”
There was a dead silence in the place.
Palla slowly lifted her head and raised her right hand.
“I desire,” she said in a low, grave voice, “to acknowledge here my belief in law, in order, and in a divine, creative, and responsible wisdom. And in ultimate continuation.”
She turned away as a demonstration began, and Jim saw her putting on her coat. There was some scattering applause, but considerable disorder where men in the audience began to harangue each other and shake dirty fingers under one another’s noses. Two personal encounters and one hair-pulling were checked by bored policemen: a girl got up and began to shout that she was a striking garment worker and that she had neither money, time, nor inclination to wait until some amateur silk-stocking felt like raising her wages.
On the platform Karl Kastner had come forward, and his icy, incisive, menacing voice cut the growing tumult.