His eloquence, always convincing, now became sublime.
With master strokes he painted vast outlines of the whole sad picture--the System based on robbery and fraud and exploitation; its natural results in millionaire and tramp and harlot and degenerate; the crime of armies of unemployed and starving men, of millions of women forced into the factories and shops, there to compete with men and lower wages and lose their finest feminine attributes in the sordid and heartless drudging for a pittance.
He told her of child slavery, and brought before her eyes the pictures he himself had seen, of the pale, stunted little victims of Mammon's greed, toiling by day and night in stifling, dangerous mines; in the Hell-glare of the glass-factories; in the hand-bruising, soul-obliterating Inferno of the coal-breakers; in the hot, linty, sickening atmosphere of the southern cotton-mills.

And as he talked, she saw for the first time the figures of these bowed and bloodless little boys and girls, giving their lives drop by drop, and cough by cough, that _she_ might have purple and fine linen and the rich, soft, easy paths of life.
* * * * * Then, pausing not, he spoke to her of white slavery, of girls and women by the uncounted thousand forced to barter their own bodies for a mockery of life; and, stinging as a nagaika, he laid the lash of blame on Capitalism, evil cause of an evil and rotten fruit, of disease and crime, and misery, and death.

He told her of political corruption beyond belief; of cheating, lying, trickery and greed, for power.

Of war, he told her, and made all its inner, hideous motives clear.

She seemed verily to see the trenches, the "red rampart's slippery edge," the spattered blood and brains and all the horror of Hell's nethermost infamy--and then the blasted, wrecked and wasted homes, the long trail of mourning and of hopeless ruin--the horror of this crime of crimes, all for profit, all for gold and markets, all for Capitalism! And then, while the girl stood there listening, spell-bound by her first insight, her first understanding of the true character of this, our striving, slaving world, held by a few for their own inordinate pride and power, the man's voice changed.
With new intonations and a deeper tone, he launched into some outlines of the great hope, the splendid vision, the Wondrous Ideal--Socialism, the world-salvation.
Sentence by sentence, imagery of this vast, noble thought flowed from his inspired lips.