The hour had called forth the man; but the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with his ear to the wind.

It had been a triumph of personality, one of those rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time come together.

This the young man admitted candidly in the very moment when he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all his works.

A man who consistently made his bid for the support of the radical element! Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he could harness them to his chariot! A man who was born in a circus tent, and who still performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this man had power, Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined, the half-educated, the mentally untrained.

It was power, as John Benham had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over empty stomachs.
There were persons in Stephen's intimate circle (there are such persons even in the most conservative communities) who contended that Vetch was in his way a rude genius.