Again did the stentor-note of Daniel ring forth, and it was amid
thunderous cheering that Richard left his chair and moved to the
front of the platform. His Sunday suit of black was still that with
which his friends were familiar, but his manner, though the audience
probably did not perceive the detail, was unmistakably hanged. He
had been wont to begin his address with short, stinging periods,
with sneers and such bitterness of irony as came within his compass.
To-night he struck quite another key, mellow, confident, hinting at
personal satisfaction; a smile was on his lips, and not a smile of
scorn. He rested one hand against his side, holding in the other a
scrap of paper with jotted items of reasoning. His head was thrown a
little back; he viewed the benches from beneath his eyelids. True,
the pose maintained itself but for a moment. I mention it because it
was something new in Richard.

He spoke of the land; he attacked the old monopoly, and visioned a
time when a claim to individual ownerships of the earth's surface
would be as ludicrous as were now the assertion of title to a
fee-simple somewhere in the moon. He mustered statistics; he adduced
historic and contemporary example of the just and the unjust in
land-holding; he gripped the throat of a certain English duke, and
held him up for flagellation; he drifted into oceans of economic
theory; he sat down by the waters of Babylon; he climbed Pisgah. Had
he but spoken of backslidings in the wilderness! But for that fatal
omission, the lecture was, of its kind, good. By degrees Richard
forgot his pose and the carefully struck note of mellowness; he
began to believe what he was saying, and to say it with the right
vigour of popular oratory. Forget his struggles with the h-fiend;
forget his syntactical lapses; you saw that after all the man had
within him a clear flame of conscience; that he had felt before