before you.  The placid power of the man gives 
place to elemental energy.  Both aspects remind one 
of the sea.  It seems almost as if he grew physically 
much bigger.  His personality fills the room.  I have 
heard many of the great orators of the day, never 
one with one tithe of the passion and power of Mr. 
Stuart.  Ben Tillett comes nearest.  But Ben Tillett 
wastes his power in furious gesture.  With Mr. 
Stuart the thunder of his tread and of his voice 
shake the house; but there is no loss of self-control.  
The speech is not diffuse, but extraordinarily 
concise and emphatic.  The words rush out like 
molten steel from a converter under the blast.  But 
each phrase is succinct and concentrated.  For this 
reason, perhaps, he could never make a popular 
speaker.  People like to have a man drone on 
pleasantly for an hour or so with mild excitement.  
They do not care to be swept away of crushed by 
real eloquence.  Yet this is the kind of speech which 
has always moved men from the beginning of the 
world, and always will.  It cannot be prolonged.  
Twenty minutes of it, and the nerve-force of every 
hearer would be exhausted.  He would be mad to 
get up and do something; and that something would 
be what Mr. Stuart told him.  But the old ideal of 
oratory has passed.  Mark Anthony’s speech would 
be rather bad form.  People do not want to be 
moved to do more than pass a nicely worded 
resolution.  But if a real crisis should arise in the 
affairs of the nation, then would come the moment 
of the genuine prophet.  With a force not his own, 
but cosmic and elemental, he would sweep away the 
cobwebs of the old ideas, the accepted sophistries of