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Passionate Politics
Passionate Politics
Emotions and Social Movements

Edited by

Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper,

and Francesca Polletta

The University o f Chicago Press

Chicago and London
Jeff Goodwin is associate professor of sociology at New York University
and author of No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements,
1945–1991. James M. Jasper is an independent scholar and the author of
Restless Nation and The Art of Moral Protest. Francesca Polletta is associ-
ate professor of sociology at Columbia University, and the author of Free-
dom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements
(forthcoming).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
 2001 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2001
Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN (cloth): 0-226-30398-5

ISBN (paper): 0-226-30399-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Passionate politics : emotions and social movements / edited by Jeff
Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-30398-5 (cloth) — ISBN 0-226-30399-3 (pbk.)
1. Social movements. 2. Emotions. 3. Political science. I.
Goodwin, Jeff. II. Jasper, James M., 1957–. III. Polletta, Francesca.
HM881 .P38 2001
303.48′4—dc21
2001000938

䊊
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
To all those who have pursued social justice with passion
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Why Emotions Matter

Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta 1

Part One Theoretical Perspectives

1 Social Movements and the Focus of

Emotional Attention
Randall Collins 27

2 Putting Emotions in Their Place

Craig Calhoun 45

3 A Structural Approach to Social

Movement Emotions
Theodore Kemper 58

4 The Business of Social Movements

Frank Dobbin 74

Part Two Cultural Contexts

5 Emotions and Political Identity:

Mobilizing Affection for the Polity
Mabel Berezin 83

6 A Revolution of the Soul: Transformative

Experiences and Immediate Abolition
Michael P. Young 99

7 Revenge of the Shamed: The Christian Right’s

Emotional Culture War
Arlene Stein 115

vii
viii Contents

Part Three Recruitment and Internal Dynamics

8 Rock the Boat, Don’t Rock the Boat, Baby:

Ambivalence and the Emergence of
Militant AIDS Activism
Deborah Gould 135

9 The Social Structure of Moral Outrage in

Recruitment to the U.S. Central America
Peace Movement
Sharon Erickson Nepstad and Christian Smith 158

10 Fear, Laughter, and Collective Power:

The Making of Solidarity at the Lenin Shipyard
in Gdnask, Poland, August 1980
Colin Barker 175

11 The Felt Politics of Charity: Serving ‘‘the

Ambassadors of God’’ and Saving ‘‘the
Sinking Classes’’
Rebecca Anne Allahyari 195

12 Animal Rights and the Politics of Emotion:

Folk Constructions of Emotion in the Animal
Rights Movement
Julian McAllister Groves 212

Part Four The Emotions of Conflict

13 Emotional Strategies: The Collective

Reconstruction and Display of Oppositional
Emotions in the Movement against Child
Sexual Abuse
Nancy Whittier 233

14 Finding Emotion in Social Movement Processes:

Irish Land Movement Metaphors and Narratives
Anne Kane 251

15 The Emotional Benefits of Insurgency in El

Salvador
Elisabeth Jean Wood 267
 Contents ix

16 Emotion Work in High-Risk Social Movements:

Managing Fear in the U.S. and East German
Civil Rights Movements
Jeff Goodwin and Steven Pfaff 282

Conclusion: Second That Emotion?

Lessons from Once-Novel Concepts in Social
Movement Research
Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta 303

List of Contributors 317

References 321

Index 353
Preface and Acknowledgments

Like many edited volumes, this one began life as a grant pro-
posal, evolved into a conference, and finally blossomed into a book. Our
own research on social movements and political conflict had made us
dissatisfied with the reigning paradigms for studying these, and we tried
to break loose by turning to culture, psychology, and agency as other
guiding impulses. Exploring the emotions of protest seemed like a way
to develop a more multifaceted image of political actors, with a broader
range of goals and motivations, tastes and styles, pains and pleasures,
than were commonly recognized in the academic literature. Although
much work remains, we hope this volume is the first step toward a richer
view of political action.
For the conference, we received a grant from the American Socio-
logical Association and the National Science Foundation through their
Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline (FAD). Craig Calhoun, then
chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University, provided
matching funds from that institution. In February 1999, we were able to
convene a small conference in New York. Attended by roughly one hun-
dred people over the course of three days, almost thirty scholars presented
their insights into emotions, politics, social movements, and social theory.
Given the lack of attention to emotions and politics in recent decades,
we were surprised—and of course gratified—by the interest and enthusi-
asm of all the participants. Thomas Lynch, Barbara Gribbins, and Merna

xi
xii Preface and Acknowledgments

Raymond of NYU’s Department of Sociology helped enormously with

the organization and logistics of the conference, which proved to be one
of the most stimulating and pleasurable we have attended.
Because we feel that the subfields of sociology have become too
ingrown, unable or unwilling to learn much from one another, we invited
a number of people to participate in the conference who are not known
primarily or at all for research on social movements and politics, in-
cluding Randall Collins, Theodore Kemper, Frank Dobbin, and Patri-
cia Clough. Charles Tilly and Edwin Amenta, well-known experts on
social movements, but from more structural perspectives, sought to
bridge different traditions within the field of social movements.
For a variety of reasons, we were able to include only about half
the conference papers and comments in the present book. We would like
to thank those conference participants whose work is not represented in
this volume, but who enriched everyone’s thinking about emotions and
politics: Leo d’Anjou, Lynn Chancer, Patricia Clough, Helena Flam, Deb-
orah Gerson, Linda Klouzal, John van Male, Doyle McCarthy, Kelly
Moore, Jean-Pierre Reed, Charles Tilly, and Guobin Yang. Contributors
followed a fairly quick timetable in going through a number of revisions,
responding to several rounds of comments from the editors and others.
Two anonymous reviewers provided sound guidance and suggestions. At
the press, Doug Mitchell’s enthusiasm was inspiring, perfectly backed up
by Robert Devens’s flawless attention to details. We would also like to
thank Saran Ghatak of NYU’s Department of Sociology for his editorial
assistance.
Royalties from this volume will be contributed to the Fund for the
Advancement of the Discipline.

Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta

Introduction

Why Emotions Matter

Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision and feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. . . .
—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”

Once at the center of the study of politics, emotions have led a

shadow existence for the last three decades, with no place in the rational-
istic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic polit-
ical analysis. Social scientists portray humans as rational and instrumen-
tal, traits which are oddly assumed to preclude any emotions. Even the
recent rediscovery of culture has taken a cognitive form, as though politi-
cal participants were computers mechanically processing symbols. Some-
how, academic observers have managed to ignore the swirl of passions
all around them in political life. With this volume, we hope to reverse

1
2 Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta

this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger and indignation, fear

and disgust, joy and love, into research on politics and protest. Emotions,
properly understood, may prove once again to be a central concern of
political analysis.
Max Weber, more than anyone, set social scientists down the road
of associating emotions with irrationality. Unlike “logical” action, he
claimed, we understand emotion-laden action through empathy, or at
least some of us do: “The more we ourselves are susceptible to such emo-
tional reactions as anxiety, anger, ambition, envy, jealousy, love, enthusi-
asm, pride, vengefulness, loyalty, devotion, and appetites of all sorts, and
to the ‘irrational’ conduct which grows out of them, the more readily we
can empathize with them. . . . For the purposes of a typological scientific
analysis it is convenient to treat all irrational, affectually determined ele-
ments of behavior as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type
of rational action” (1978 [1922]: 6). This places emotional action in a
similar category as “traditional” action, in a gray zone “between mean-
ingful and merely reactive behavior.” Of course, Weber recognized the
possibility of “mixed” types of action, but he generally assumed that ra-
tional action could not be emotional, and vice versa. Social scientists have
been traveling down this road ever since.
Until the 1960s emotions were considered a key—for some, the
key—to understanding virtually all political action that occurred outside
familiar political institutions. In nineteenth-century images of the mob,
normal individuals were thought to be transformed mysteriously in the
presence of a crowd, prone to anger and violence, and easily manipulated
by demagogues. Well into the twentieth century, crowds and their dy-
namics were conceived as the heart of protest movements. Crowds were
assumed to create, through suggestion and contagion, a kind of psycho-
logically “primitive” group mind and group feelings, shared by all partici-
pants and outside their normal range of sensibilities. In Herbert Blumer’s
(1939) formulation, crowds short-circuited symbolic communication,
with participants responding directly to each other’s physical actions. As
a result, they could easily be driven by anxiety and fear, especially when
spurred by rumors. They were also, he believed, irritable and prone to
excitement. Other scholars argued that frustration led inevitably or fre-
quently to aggression, especially when reinforced by crowd dynamics
(Miller and Dollard 1941).
Scholars also looked for peculiar individuals who might be suscep-
tible to recruitment, even brainwashing. Most saw something like alien-
ation (Kornhauser 1959) or a predisposition toward violence (Allport
1924). Freudian psychology was often appropriated to show that partici-
 Introduction: Why Emotions Matter 3

pants were immature: narcissistic, latently homosexual, oral dependent,

or anal retentive. Harold Lasswell (1930, 1948) saw a political “type”
for whom politics was an effort to fulfill needs not met in private life.
Eric Hoffer (1951) likewise saw a desperate fanatic who needed to believe
in something, no matter what. Because driven by inner needs, especially
the lack of a secure identity, Hoffer’s true believer could never be satisfied.
He hoped to lose himself in a collective identity. Participation itself was
his sole motivation; the goals of protest hardly mattered. Fears of fas-
cism and communism only exacerbated these dismissive tendencies in the
1950s.
Even the social movements of the 1960s did not always arouse sym-
pathy, as they could be dismissed as the work of confused youngsters.
Like many on the “other” side of the generation gap that appeared in
the 1960s, Neil Smelser (1968) analyzed student protest as largely an
Oedipal rebellion. Orrin Klapp (1969: 11–13) described the signs of
“identity trouble” that led people to seek fulfillment in collective action:
a feeling of being blemished, self-hatred, oversensitivity, excessive self-
concern (including narcissism), alienation, a feeling that “nobody ap-
preciates me,” a desire to be someone else, a feeling of fraudulent self-
presentation, Riesman’s “other-directedness,” and an identity crisis. In
academic traditions like these, protest was either a mistake, a form of
acting out, or a sign of immaturity.
Among protestors themselves, there were other traditions—largely
alien to the academy—picturing participants in a more positive light.
Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and their successors portrayed revolutionaries as
rationally pursuing their material interests. For Marxists, the interesting
questions had more to do with how to succeed than with explaining why
people would rebel, which to them was obvious—at least until Gramsci
and his generation were forced to explain the Western proletariat’s lack
of revolutionary consciousness. If, in the academic portrait, there was
nothing but a swirl of passions, in the revolutionary vision there were
hardly passions at all. As the twentieth century progressed, however,
community organizers such as Saul Alinsky were able to portray their
followers as both rational and emotional; emotions were a useful strategic
factor (which organizers could manipulate without necessarily having
any themselves). For proponents of nonviolent direct action, who became
influential in the radical pacifist movement in the 1940s and the civil
rights movement in the 1950s, emotion management was crucial. If an-
ger and indignation often spurred participation, a movement animated
primarily by such sentiments was doomed to failure. Winning over op-
ponents, or at least undermining public support for them, depended
4 Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta

on conveying an image of calm resolution and serene determination.

Widely read Gandhian disciples like Richard Gregg (1934) and Krish-
nalal Shridharani (1939) provided careful instruction on how to substi-
tute love for anger. However, this line of thinking, like the Leninist and
Alinskyist traditions, had little impact on academic models.
The portrayal of emotions at the core of academic treatments of
protest was flawed in many ways. In one tradition, emotions came di-
rectly from crowds, having little to do with individuals’ own lives and
goals. They appeared and disappeared in response to what was happening
in one’s immediate surroundings, with little lasting resonance. In the
other, emotions were primarily emanations from individual personality
conflicts—a legacy of Freudian psychology—rather than responses to the
environment. Thus, only certain kinds of flawed or immature people were
susceptible to movement appeals. The emotions they had were inevitably
negative or troubled rather than positive and joyful; they reflected a psy-
chological problem, albeit one that might go away with maturity. Partici-
pants did not choose or enjoy protest, but were compelled to it by their
inner demons. In both traditions, there were severe methodological prob-
lems: the salient emotions were often vague and difficult to identify except
through the very actions they were meant to explain. Can we recognize
a propensity to violence except when it results in violence? Can we see
anomie or alienation except through forms of participation or nonpartici-
pation? Emotions like these are unusual, rarely attached to normal action
or to rational interests. But in the absence of empirical investigation, what
Gustave Le Bon thought he saw in crowds in 1895 or Eric Hoffer believed
he saw in political extremism in 1951 was more a projection of their own
fears and anxieties than an accurate psychological portrait of protestors.
On the one hand, efforts to bring psychological insight to bear on
politics usually reduced the latter to little more than internal personality
dynamics. On the other hand, group psychology often ignored individual
traits altogether. Little was recognized between the individual and the
social: no social networks, organizations, shared cultural meanings, pro-
cesses of negotiation and interaction. Protestors either already had their
set of emotions, or they got them in the crowd. Driven by forces outside
their control, whether subconscious drives or the mysterious pull of the
crowd, they were not rational agents with purposes of their own. Most
of all, the actual stuff of politics—moral principles, avowed goals, pro-
cesses of mobilization, strategizing, the pleasures of participation—was
absent.
By the early 1970s, many sociologists had either been active in or
were sympathetic to the movements they studied. Dismissive of the pejo-
 Introduction: Why Emotions Matter 5

rative tone and empirical inaccuracy of prior accounts, their orientation

was structural, rationalistic, and organizational. Protestors were simply
pursuing existing group and individual interests, largely defined by struc-
tural positions such as social class. They operated outside normal political
channels primarily when access to those channels was blocked. Rather
than being studied alongside fads, crazes, and panics, social movements
were now seen as an extension of normal, everyday politics, as “politics
by other means.” Drawing from the revolutionary tradition, the new ob-
servers were more interested in the “how” of organization-building, strat-
egy, and tactics than in the “why” of motivation. Just as older theorists
had concluded that their emotions made protestors irrational, the new
generation of scholars—eventually dubbed the resource-mobilization
paradigm—treated rational protestors as devoid of emotions. Since the
end of the 1960s, accordingly, emotions have played almost no role in
theories of social movements and collective action.
Just as scholars coming of age in the 1970s attacked their elders for
theoretical and empirical blindness, so it is now clear that they too were
unable to see many aspects of protest. Their methods of research imposed
some blinders. It is hard to identify emotions from brief newspaper ac-
counts of protest events. Historical research precludes the participant ob-
servation that may be the best means for identifying the emotions of pro-
test. In addition, the strength of mobilization theorists’ opposition to
crowd theories may have been conceptually limiting. Resource mobiliza-
tion theories were empirical, scientific, rigorous—everything the earlier
theorists were not. What went on inside people’s heads—not to mention
their hearts—was murky, dangerous, and pejorative. Mobilization theo-
rists felt they could ignore all that.
In the past three decades, mobilization models have evolved in many
ways (nicely captured in Morris and Mueller 1992). First came a recogni-
tion of the importance of the movement’s environment, especially the
state. This was followed eventually by an acknowledgment that move-
ment players interpreted their surroundings through cultural lenses, as a
number of scholars showed that movement organizers engaged in cultural
work—summed up as “framing”—in order to recruit members (Snow
et al. 1986). Finally, scholars relaxed the strictly rationalistic assump-
tions about individual motivation (e.g., Olson 1965), recognizing group
solidarity as a relevant factor. Loyalty to a “collective identity” might
encourage an individual to participate even if cost-benefit calculations
at the level of the individual did not favor it (Fireman and Gamson
1979; Polletta and Jasper 2001). In recent years, a full-blown cultural
approach to social movements has emerged as an alternative to resource-
6 Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta

mobilization models even in their revamped form (Johnston and Klander-

mans 1995; Melucci 1996; Jasper 1997).
Few of those responsible for the recent cultural turn have recognized
the importance of emotions in politics, however, apparently still accepting
the view that emotions are not part of rational action. Methodological
barriers have persisted, since the rigorous questionnaires and controlled
experiments favored by social psychologists who study emotions are not
always appropriate or feasible in studies of protest. More at fault is the
sociology of culture, which has proliferated terms and concepts for under-
standing meanings and boundaries and the more cognitive aspects of cul-
ture—frames, schemata, codes, tool kits, narratives, discourses—but has
offered little that would help us grapple with feelings. Cultural sociology,
so powerful in many ways, has been nearly silent about emotions (for ex-
ample, Lamont and Fournier 1992; Crane 1994; Zerubavel 1998).
While not explicitly theorized or even recognized, emotions are
nonetheless present in many of the concepts that scholars have used to
extend our understanding of social movements in recent years. Mobiliz-
ing structures, frames, collective identity, political opportunities—much
of the causal force attributed to these concepts comes from the emotions
involved in them. This should be apparent when we examine several of
them (for more, see Jasper 1998; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2000).
Frames are one of the most commonly used concepts in the social-
movement literature, used to capture a number of cultural processes. Dur-
ing recruitment to protest groups, especially, organizers and potential
participants must “align” their “frames,” achieving a common definition
of a social problem and a common prescription for solving it. David Snow
and Robert Benford (1992: 137), the concept’s leading advocates, define
a frame as “an interpretive schemata that simplifies and condenses the
‘world out there’ by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situa-
tions, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one’s present
or past environment.” Snow and Benford (1988) see three types of fram-
ing as necessary for successful recruitment: diagnostic, in which a move-
ment convinces potential converts that a problem needs to be addressed;
prognostic, in which it convinces them of appropriate strategies, tactics,
and targets; and motivational, in which it exhorts them to get involved
in these activities.
The many definitions and applications of frames and framing pro-
cesses deal almost entirely with their cognitive components. “Motivational
framing,” which would seem to have a great deal to do with emotions, is
rarely discussed, although it is apparently what gets people actually to do
something. Cognitive agreement alone does not result in action. Benford
 Introduction: Why Emotions Matter 7

himself points out in a recent retrospective (1997: 419) that “those op-
erating within the framing/constructionist perspective have not fared much
better than their structuralist predecessors in elaborating the role of emo-
tions in collective action. Instead, we continue to write as though our
movement actors (when we actually acknowledge humans in our texts)
are Spock-like beings, devoid of passion and other human emotions.”
More widely, the motivation to engage in protest—a process over-
flowing with emotions—has been largely ignored in recent research be-
cause it has so often been taken for granted under the structuralist as-
sumption of objectively given interests. Once the desire and willingness
to protest are assumed, only changes in the opportunity or the collective
capacity to act on them are needed to explain the rise of social move-
ments. Doug McAdam used the term cognitive liberation for this mo-
ment, arguing that “objective” opportunities for action only lead to ac-
tion when potential protestors recognize those opportunities as such. As
he described it, “the altered responses of members to a particular chal-
lenger serve to transform evolving political conditions into a set of ‘cog-
nitive cues’ signifying to insurgents that the political system is becoming
increasingly vulnerable to challenge” (McAdam 1982: 49). Thus, even
though the term seems to imply a radical change in one’s perspective or
worldview, cognitive liberation is portrayed as a relatively instrumental
reading of available information about the likelihood of repression.
“Liberation” implies heady emotions that “cognitive” then denies.1 As
McAdam says, some such shift is crucial to the emergence of protest
movements. But what is liberated and how? To take an example from
his own work, McAdam argues that the series of Supreme Court decisions
favoring black petitioners which culminated in Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion (1954) demonstrated to black southerners the government’s new
amenability to black claims. Such decisions were thus a key political op-
portunity for black insurgency. But, in contrast to McAdam’s portrayal,
the 1954 Brown decision was followed by a wave of repression in the
deep South and the formation of the notorious White Citizens Councils;
counting 80,000 members within two years, the councils relied on eco-
nomic reprisals and physical intimidation to quash desegregation and reg-
istration efforts. Seven black activists in Mississippi were killed in 1955
alone. While over 20,000 blacks were on the Mississippi voting rolls in
the early 1950s, the number had dropped to 8,000 by 1956. Between
1955 and 1958, the NAACP lost 246 southern branches and 48,000
members (C. Payne 1995). Brown nevertheless served as a potent symbol
and effective tool in subsequent southern organizing, not as an objective
or purely cognitive indicator of the odds of success, but as an emotional
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Now, what Laura, his wife, knew is not for us to say. She held her peace.
Never a word of complaint, or taunt, or reproach, or of longing came to her
lips. Never did she repine at the situation of life which held them for more
than a dozen years after they were married—one of perpetual monotony, of
narrow, iron-bound restraint. After some incredible, some miraculous way
of womankind, she managed to make the ends meet, indeed even to overlap
a trifle at each week-end. She smiled in the morning when he went away,
smiled in the evening when he returned, and if meanwhile she did not smile
again throughout all the day, at least she did her part. A great soul, this of
Laura Rawn; but no greater than that of many another woman who does
these things day after day until the time comes for the grave, wherein she
lies down at last with equanimity and calm. Without unduly flattering the
vanity, without overfeeding the egotism of her lord and master, at least
Laura Rawn was wise enough to see he could not be much changed.
Finding herself thus situated, she accepted her case and spent her time
doing what could be done, not wasting it in seeking the impossible. He was
her husband, that was all. She knew no better way of life than to accept that
fact and make the most of it. Which is tragedy, if you please.

III

After the birth of Grace Rawn, their daughter, which occurred within the
first year of their wedded life, Laura Rawn had something to interest her for
the remainder of their days. Her horizon widened now immeasurably;
indeed to the extent of giving her a world of her own wherein she could
dwell apart quite comfortably; one in which her husband had no part.
Simple and just in her way of thought, she accepted the truth that without
married life, without her husband, this new world could not have been her
own. Wherefore she credited him, and in her child, somewhat reverenced
him. She was an old-fashioned wife.

As to the child herself, she grew steadily and normally into young
girlhood, in time into young womanhood, not given to much display,
reserved of judgment as well as of speech, ofttimes sullen in mood, yet
withal a step or so higher than her mother on the ladder of feminine charm.
She had a clean, good family rearing, and a good grammar school
education. At about the time her father came to be a man of middle age,
Grace fell into her place in the clerical machine of the railway office where
he worked; for very naturally, being an American girl of small means, she
took up shorthand, and was licensed to do violence. At home she joined her
mother in regard and attention for the master of the house.

IV

Here, then, was simply a good, middle-class American family, offering

for some years little to attract the attention of those who dwelt about them.
The head of this family, as he attained additional solidity of figure, grew
even heavier of brow, trod with even more stateliness about his appointed
duties. It was a privilege for the other clerks who labored near him to see
such calm, such dignity. On the street John Rawn asked no pardons if he
brushed against his fellow-man. In his business life, in his conduct upon the
street-car, at the restaurant table, anywhere, he helped himself as though of
right, and regarded the rights or preferences of others not at all. The
community cream, the individual butter, he accumulated unto himself
unsmilingly, as once he had bananas in his youth. Broad hints, deprecating
smiles, annoyed protests, all were lost upon him. At forty-seven years of
age his salary was but one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. That
showed only the lack of wisdom of others, not unfitness in himself. Had this
been Greece, or Rome, or mediæval England, he would have shown them
who was entitled to the throne! Indeed, he would show them that yet. He
often told his wife and daughter as much.

Did we not know the genesis of Mr. Rawn, and did we not know full
well the divine right of kings, we might call this rather a curious frame of
mind for a man who dwelt in a small house with green blinds and a dingy
back yard, for whose conjoint charms he paid but twenty dollars a month,
on whose floors there was much efflorescence of art square, upon whose
be-lambrequined mantels showed few works of art beyond a series of
bisque shepherdesses and china dogs, on whose parlor table reclined a
Dying Gaul, and on whose boudoir walls hung an engraving of the Rock of
Ages. But John Rawn bided his time. He went on year after year, grave and
dignified, perhaps one new cross wrinkle coming in his forehead with each
Christmas, recorded by one more annual shepherdess upon the family
mantel.

And yet all this time success was lying in ambush, as it sometimes does,
ready to spring forth at the appointed hour. At about this time there occurred
changes in the arrangement of the planets, the juxtaposition of the spheres,
which meant great alteration in the affairs of John Rawn, of Kelly Row,
who dwelt in a brick house six miles out from the railway office where he
had worked for twenty-four years, and where he had risen in so brief a time
all the way from forty to one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month.

Let us dwell upon the picture for a moment, deliriously. Could it be

possible that this man in time would own a large part of this railway and of
others? Was it possible to predict a day when an army of clerks and others,
here or there, would stand ready to jump when Rawn cracked over them a
whip whose handle well fitted in his hand? Could the time be predicted,
dreamed, imagined, when the president of this road, the great Henry
Warfield Standley, would spring to open the door for John Rawn, twenty-
four years a clerk, of whose existence he had not long known?

Yet all these things actually did occur. They could occur only in
America; but this is America. They could occur only at the summons of a
megalomaniac selfishness, an inordinate lust of power; but here were these,
biding their time, in the seriously assured mind of an American man; a man
after all born of his age and of his country, and representative of that
country's typical ambition—the ambition for a material success.

The lust of power—that was it! The promise of power—that was what
the small bird had sung in John Rawn's ear! The craving and coveting of
power—that was what quivered in the marrow of his bones, that put
ponderousness in his tread, that shone out of his eyes.
 It was this, it was all of these, focused suddenly and unexpectedly by the
lens of accident into a burning point of certainty, which marked the air and
attitude of John Rawn one evening on his return to his home at the
conclusion of his day's work. He almost stumbled as he entered the door,
heedless of the threshold. He paced up and down the narrow little hall, trod
here and there almost as in a trance, muttering to himself, before at last he
stood in front of his wife and spread out his arms—not for her, but for the
imaginary multitude whom he addressed in her.

"Laura," said he, "Laura, it's come! I've got the idea. It's going to win.
We're going to be rich. I've believed it all along, and I know it now! Laura,
look at me—didn't I always tell you so—didn't I know?"

He stood before her, his shoulders back, his chin up, his brow frowning,
his lips trembling in simple, devout admiration of himself. It was not
defiance that marked his attitude. John Rawn did not defy the lightning. He
only wondered why the lightning had so long defied him.

CHAPTER VI
MR. RAWN ANNOUNCES HIS ARRIVAL

For some time Mrs. Rawn said nothing in answer to her husband's
declaration. She had known such things before. Indeed, with woman's
instinct for deliberate self-deception, she sometimes in spite of her own
clear-sightedness had persuaded herself to feel a sort of resentment at the
conditions which so long had held her husband back; had been sure, as so
many wives are, that only a conspiracy of injustice had thwarted him of
success. If only he could get his chance! That was the way she phrased it, as
most wives do—and most husbands.
 But to-day there was something so sincere in his air as to take her
beyond her own forced insincerity with herself. She caught conviction from
his tone. There fell this time upon the sensitized plate of her woman's nature
some sort of shadow of events to come which left there a permanent imprint
as of the truth.

"What is it, John?" she demanded. Her eye kindled, her voice had in it
something not of forced or perfunctory interest. He caught these also, in his
exalted mood almost as sensitive as herself.

"Then you believe it at last!" he demanded, almost fiercely. It was the

voice of his father speaking, demanding of a sinner whether or not she had
repented of her former fallen state. "You begin to think that after all I'll do
something for us both? Oh, well, I'm glad—"

"Why, John, I always thought so," she eluded mildly. "When did I ever
—"

"Oh, I don't know that you ever said it in so many words," he grumbled,
"but of course I knew how you felt about it. I suppose a woman can't help
that. It was my part to succeed somehow, some time, in spite of you. I
always knew I would."

He paced up and down, his coat tails back of the hands which he thrust
deep into his pockets. "I'll tell you again, since I have never spoken of this
—for fear you'd think me just a little conceited about myself"—he smiled in
a manner of deprecation, never for an instant catching the comedy of this,
more than she herself displayed proof of her own wish to smile—"I'll tell
you anyhow, though you may think I've got a bit of vanity about myself.
The truth is, I've always believed in myself, Laura! I've kept it hidden, of
course—never let a soul know that I thought myself the least bit different
from anybody else. You didn't know it, even—and you're my wife. I've been
considered a modest man all, my life. Yet, Laura, here's the truth about it—I
wasn't, really! I did feel different from other men. I didn't feel just like an
ordinary man. I knew I was not—and there's the truth about it. I don't know
exactly how to tell you, but I've always known, as sure as anything, that
some day I'd be a rich man."
 II

She sat looking at him seriously, her elbows resting on the table, her gray
eyes following him as he walked, his face serious, the imperious lock of
hair now fallen across his forehead.

"Not that I would let money itself be the only thing, my dear, as you
know," he went on nobly. "I wouldn't do that. Any man worth while has
larger ambitions than merely making money. After I've made money
enough, for us—more than you ever dreamed about—after I've succeeded
and proved myself—then I'm going to do something for other men—my
inferiors in life, you know—the laboring men. I suppose, after all, people
are pretty much alike in some ways. Some men are stronger than others,
more fit to succeed; but they ought to remember that after all they are the
agents of Providence, that they are custodians, Laura, custodians. No man,
Laura, no matter what his success, ought to be wholly selfish. He oughtn't
to be—well, conceited about himself, you know. He ought to be humble."

She still looked after him, wondering whether, after all, he might not be
a trifle off his head; but the seriousness of his eye daunted her.

"As for us, we'll move up to Chicago first, in all likelihood; maybe later
to New York, for I suppose business will take us there a great deal of the
time. As to where we'll make our home eventually, I hardly know.
Sometimes I think we'll come back here and build a real house, just to show
these people who we were all the time. Wherever we build, we'll furnish,
too. I'm going to be a spender. Oh, I've longed for it all my life—the feel of
money going out between my fingers! Not all for ourselves, mind you.
Maybe you don't quite understand about that—I couldn't expect you to. But
after I've done something for the common people, I want to build something
—churches, monuments, something that will stick and stay after you and I
are gone, and tell them who John Rawn was. I want them to say, most of all,
that he was a modest man, that he was a kind man, and not a selfish one—
not a selfish man, Laura."
 III

She nodded, looking at him fixedly, large-natured enough to be just in

the assembling of these crude and unformulated ambitions which she knew
tormented him. "Yes, John," she said quietly.

The next instant his mood changed.

"But one thing they'll have to do!" he said, smiting a fist into his palm.
"They'll have to admit that I was John Rawn! They'll have to realize that
success comes where it belongs. My brain, my energy, my point of view, my
ability to command men, my instinct for leadership—they'll have to
recognize all that. I'll make them see who we were all the time. Why, Laura,
we've just been walking along a flat floor, more than twenty years, and now
we're going to take the elevator. We'll go up now, straight and fast.

"I'm going to make you happy now," he mused. "You've been a good
enough wife. I always said that to myself—'She's been a good wife.' I'm
going to show you that you didn't make any mistake that night when you
took me, only a railway clerk, with a salary of forty a month."

She did not remind him that, so far as she knew, he was still a railway
clerk, with a salary which in twenty years had not grown abnormally. But
now her own ambitions began to vault: first of all, the ambition of a mother
for her child. She accepted all these vague statements as convincing truths;
for where we hope we are easily convinced.

"But how soon, John? You see, there is Grace, our girl."

"She'll wear diamonds and real clothes."

"I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of her education. Grace ought
to go to some good girls' college in the East. You see, you and I didn't have
so very much education, John," she smiled.
 He frowned in answer. "We didn't need so much, so far as that goes.
Books are not everything. There's plenty of college men who don't amount
to anything."

"I didn't so much mean books. But you see, John, we've lived rather
carelessly. We've not been very conventional, we don't know very many
people, and—maybe—we don't know much how things are done, you see.
Now suppose we were giving a dinner, and you had to take out the guest of
honor—"

"Nonsense! I reckon any guest'd feel honored enough to come to my

house. I'm not worrying about that. Cash in the bank is the main thing for
the guest of honor. As for the girl, she'll have as much education as we had,
and that's enough."

"But I want her to be a lady, John."

"Can't she be?"

"I'll want her to marry well, John."

"Won't she? If she has money, can't she?"

"But I want her to be prized for herself, for what she is."

"She'll be our daughter, and won't that be enough?"

"But herself!"

"She's our girl. I don't see where she'd find better parents."

"I was just thinking—about her education—that a little finishing would

help her. We wouldn't always live just as we are living now, and she ought
to be prepared for better things. We read about things, but what do we know
about them? Grace ought to know."

"I don't really join in your anxiety, Mrs. Rawn," said he largely, "but
that'll all come, if it's needful."
 "It's needful now. Grace'll be a young woman before long. You see—"
she flushed painfully as she spoke—"I don't want to see her grow up
awkward. I don't want her to feel as though she hadn't been used to things,
you know—to be ashamed of herself and her—her parents. Not that I care
so much for myself—"

There were tears in her eyes—tears of reaction, of hope however badly

founded. She had toiled long and patiently.

"Why, what's the matter, Laura?" asked her husband.

"I'm getting to be almost old, John—I'm almost an old lady now! I've got
gray hairs. I'm forty-five."

He shook her by the shoulders playfully. "Nonsense! We're almost of an

age, and I'm just beginning life. Grace is only a child."

"She's eighteen past. That's why I asked you how soon—tell me, have
they really raised your salary, John? If we could only have two thousand
dollars a year it would be all in the world I should ask."

"Salary!" he guffawed. "Two thousand dollars a year! Say that much a

month, a week, a day!"

"You're crazy, John! What do you mean?" Indeed, some doubt of his
sanity now began to enter her mind.

"Read in the papers about the daily incomes of those big chaps, those
really great men back East, the fellows who run things. Every one of them
made it out of nothing—not one of them had any one to give him a start.
We've no right to say that I can't do as well as they have. The start's the
thing."

"But what has happened, then? I never saw you so stirred up before in all
my life, John."

"I never have been."

"But what is sure—what can I depend on for Grace?"

 "Death, taxes, and a woman's curiosity are all the sure things. I don't
know anything else that is sure. No man can give all the details of his life in
advance."

"In advance?"

"Oh, it hasn't all actually happened yet, of course. I won't begin wheeling
home a wheelbarrow full of gold every night for quite a while. But some
day I may!" His lips closed grimly.

IV

"Grace'll be a young woman before long," his wife still mused,

irrelevantly.

"Let that take care of itself. I'll deliver the goods."

She allowed herself a smile. "They are not delivered?"

He flushed at this. "You think they never will be? Very well, I'll fight it
out alone. At least I believe in myself."

"But what's happened? What do you mean, after all?" She put her hand
upon his arm as he passed. He flung himself into a chair opposite her, his
own elbows on the table as he faced her.

"You can't understand it, Laura; but listen. There are two ways of getting
rich. You can make money without brains in real estate, other people
building you up rich. That's luck, not brains. A great many of the great
fortunes—take Astor's, for instance, in New York—have been made in that
way. But that's a fortune which you O.K. after it's made, and you don't
know anything about it in advance—it's too far in the future. You don't hear
of the ones that are not made. Astor used his best judgment and bought land
up the island, where he thought people would go, but he didn't know they'd
go there. That's as much luck as brains. We call luck brains when it makes
good.

"But there's another way of getting rich. That means real brains, and not
luck. It means deliberately figuring out what people are going to do. There
is only so much room on the surface of the earth. But there's room in the air
for millions and millions of basic ideas."

He gloomed across at her, but she kindled, as ready as ever to travel with
his thought.

"Look at a few of the big ideas which have paid," he said. "Give the
people something they haven't had; get them so they have to have it! Cinch
it first, and sell it afterward—and you're going to get rich. Granted an idea
which takes hold on the daily life of the whole people, and there's no way of
measuring the money you can make.

"For instance, you couldn't put the world back to the place where it could
get along without refined oil, without steam and electric transportation, and
the telephone, and a thousand other things which have made men rich—
inventions which seemed little at first, but which were universal after a
while. Oil, water, iron, wood, steel—we have to have those things. Cinch
them and sell them. That's the way to get rich, my dear. Get an idea, get to it
first, and cinch it for your own. Then sell it. Keep on selling it. Give 'em
something they've got to have, after showing 'em they've got to have it.
Teach 'em what they ought to have known without any teaching. Some men
teach and others pay them for it. After that, all you've got to do is to take it
away from them. When you've taken away enough, make 'em crawl—make
'em admit that you were greater than they were. Then build your monument
and make them keep on remembering you. After that—"

"And after that, John?" she said gently.

V
 He did not hear her. He sat staring, as though in the mirror of his own
mind. At last he let his hand drop across the table. She dropped her own into
his, timidly.

"Listen, Laura," he went on. "I'll tell you a little of what I mean."

"Yes, John, I'm sure you will."

"What's the distinguishing thing about life to-day, my dear—the thing

that makes it different from that of the past?"

"Why, I don't know."

"A great many don't know. They don't stop to think! That's why so many
pass by the open door of success and never get inside. Listen, Laura. Wait a
minute—don't interrupt me. Speed is the thing to-day. Speed, speed, speed;
and power! Don't you see it all around you, don't you feel it? Can't you
almost smell it, touch it, taste it? It's on the street, in the house, in business,
everywhere—we can't go fast enough. But we're going faster. We'll go twice
as fast."

"How do you know? What do you mean? Who told you, John?"

"That's my business. That's my idea. That's my invention. That's how I'm

going to get rich.

"Laura, I'm going to make it possible to gear up our national life, to

double its present speed," he went on savagely.

"When they've got it, they'll think they always had it, and after that they
all will always have to have it. I'll be there first. I'll cinch it, and I'll sell it.
That's my idea. That's not luck. It's brains, brains, brains, Laura!"

VI
 She leaned back in her chair, sighing. "Do you think I could have a silk
dress, John?" she said at length, her mind overleaping vast intermediate
details.

"My God, woman!"

"Could we go to the theaters—I've always wanted to so much. Could I

go into the country once in a while, where things are green?"

He made a despairing gesture at her inability to grasp the future.

"We could travel—could we go over to Europe—could we take Grace

there, John?"

"As often as you liked!"

"Could we have a new gate in the picket fence, if the landlord still
refused?"

"Oh, my God!"

She sat, trying to rise to the pitch of such ambition, but succeeded only
in remaining commonplace. "How did you come across it, John?" she asked
after a little.

He smiled. "What did I say about death and taxes and a woman's
curiosity? The truth is, I picked it up from a word or so I heard in a chance
conversation—two young fellows from the engineering department were
talking something over. That young chap named Halsey, just out of some
college, full of fads, you know. He'd been reading something his old
professor had been monkeying over. I got my idea then—the idea of making
any automobile go twice as fast as it does, any railway train, anything else
—of cutting out a lot of useless human labor, and setting the power of
gravitation to work."

"I thought you said this was your own idea?"

"It is my own. What is thrown away deliberately, and picked up, is mine,
if I see the value in it. Young Halsey didn't know. He's just a visionary—
nothing practical about him. He couldn't see into this."

"Halsey—Charley Halsey of the offices? He's been here—I think Grace

—you see, the Personal Injury office, where she works, is just across the
hall from the Engineering—"

"Well, it's no difference. I'm going to take care of the affair myself. But it
might be just as well if he came, once in a while. Grace might do worse."

"But you heard him speak of it first?"

"I've just told you, yes, woman! But there was nothing worked out. I've
got to furnish the time and money and brains and the plan of working it out.
I've never said a word to him yet, of course, and I don't want you to say a
word."

Her face fell. "I'm afraid I can't understand all these things, John. But I
should think you'd take Charley in as a partner. That is, if Grace— Maybe
he could help."

"A partner? With me? Laura, John Rawn has no partners."

VII

She rose after a time, her eyes not seeking his.

"Grace will be coming home directly," she said briskly. "I must get
supper ready."

"One thing"—he raised a restraining hand—"keep quiet about this. I've

told you too much already."

For half an instant Laura Rawn almost wondered whether this thing
might not be true. Such things had happened in this country. Was there not
daily proof before her eyes? And might not fortune reverse her wheel for
them also; might not lightning choose, as sometimes elsewhere it had
chosen, a humble and unimportant spot for its alighting? Who can read the
plans of the immortal gods? asked the pagans of old. Who, asked Laura
Rawn, devout Christian, can foresee the plans of a Divine Providence?

As for John Rawn, he troubled but little over the immortal gods or over a
Divine Providence, feeling small need of the aid of either. He had himself.

CHAPTER VII
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN

Thus far, the Rawn planet had moved but in restricted orbit, to wit: one
bounded as to one extremity by the dingy yard and narrow walls of a home
rented at twenty dollars a month; at the other, by the still dingier and more
prosaic business surroundings of a railway's general offices. Narrow and
dull enough the Rawn life had been, and in such a life, lived on into middle
age, you scarce could have blamed a man had he settled back for ever into
the grip of the upreaching fingers of monotony. The half mechanical and
parrot-like repetition of set phrases in a restricted line of business
correspondence for Rawn himself, day after day; the dull and endless round
of homekeeping duties for the wife—what but narrowness and dullness
could come out of life such as this? Wherefore you should not have been
surprised had you been told that Grace Rawn was simply the outgrowth of
this sort of home, this sort of life, not much different from other girls of her
class.

We are coming more and more in America to use that word "class." The
theory is that we came to this continent to escape class; but surely class has
followed us, and restricted us, and counted us out into elect and damned,
into those above and those below the salt. Rather let us say the truth, which
is that class has followed us because we ourselves have followed after class.
 But continually the great laws of survival go on after their own fashion.
In the production of human beings there continually are at work the five
laws of evolution, the five factors of heredity, environment and selection,
blended with variation and isolation. These five factors build human
characters, continue ever to do their amazing sums in life and success and
survival. Sometimes they produce a Grace Rawn.

II

Perhaps it was the very factor of isolation that gave Grace Rawn her
quality. She was a silent girl, somewhat reserved. Silence and reserve she
got from her father's solemn self-absorption, her mother's quiet self-
abnegation. She was softened in part by the gentle training of her mother,
who talked most when her husband was not present.

Grace Rawn stood two inches taller than her mother, and had a certain
severe distinction which covered many sins in shorthand. Her brows were
dark and met above her eyes; and the latter, being somewhat myopic,
usually were covered by glasses—which also not infrequently shield yet
other multitudes of sins in stenography. Her chin was well out and forward.
Her jaw was rounded, her teeth white and good, her carriage also good, if
still a trifle stiff and awkward. In air she was slow and deliberate. Her eyes
were gray like her mother's, her voice deep like her father's. She was what
would be called old for her years, indeed a woman at sixteen. Most would
have placed her age some years further on than the eighteen years which
really were hers at this time.

Grace Rawn could not be said to have any circle of friends. Her soul was
eclectic. In short, isolation, selection and variation, the three less known
laws of growth, had done as much for her as the more vaunted factors of
heredity and environment. Self-contained, adequate enough in appearance,
although lacking that sort of magnetism which draws men to women, she
would have passed with small notice in the average collection of her sex.
For such as these, propinquity comes as a blessing in so far as natural
selection is concerned.
 III

In St. Louis, natural selection operated much as in the Silurian or the

Elizabethan, or eke the Jeffersonian age, choice being made from that
which offered at the family doorstep in either era. In Kelly Row good folk
sat upon the doorstep of an eventide. The evening assemblage upon the
Rawn front doorstep in Kelly Row grew larger as Grace grew older. Certain
young men came. Why did they come? Why do we walk about and around
a tree that hangs full in fruit not yet ripened, watching the bloom on this, the
texture of that, the size or probable flavor of yonder example hanging as yet
unfinished in the alchemy of the summer sun? At least the little company at
times was larger on the Rawn front stoop of an evening. It all went on in the
easy, careless, hopeful, unconventional fashion of families of the Rawn
class. Let it be remembered that class really is class in this country. There
seemed little hope for Grace, therefore, other than in a marriage after the
stereotyped fashion of Kelly Row. Perhaps if good fortune attended, she
might marry a man who, at middle age, might, like her father, be drawing a
salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month; a great man in the
eyes of the world of Kelly Row, which lived on an average of half that per
month.

IV

In this evening company, as Laura Rawn had mentioned, occasionally

might have been found one Charles Halsey, himself now some twenty-four
years of age at next spring's lambing-time; as his father, a Missouri farmer,
would have said. Halsey had come to the city, a serious-minded youth, to
seek his fortune, just as John Rawn had done at about the time Halsey
himself was born. But whereas Rawn had concerned himself little in books,
Halsey had, by such means as only himself could have told, managed a
degree in engineering in what New England calls a freshwater college, the
same not so good as salt, yet, in Halsey's belief better than none and
cheaper than some. Once out of college and finding himself belated, he had
thrust into the thick of the fray of the business world to the best of his
ability, though to his surprise not setting the world into any conflagration.
These four years now, as chance had had it, he had been engaged in the
drafting department of the engineer's offices in the same railway which
employed John Rawn. A thoughtful young chap enough, and one held rather
student than good fellow by his fellow clerks, because for the most part he
did not join them in their dissipations, their cheap joys, their narrow ways
of thinking. Also a chap regarded as not wholly desirable because he read
much, and because he had ideas.

Charles Halsey, as well as Grace Rawn, in some sort seemed to set the
laws of heredity and environment at defiance in favor of the lesser factors in
evolution. He had originally no right to be anything but a farm lad, yet he
had dreams, and so had fought his way through college. There, in the world
of books, close to the world of thought, not far from the world of art, he had
become what some of us might have called an idealist, what most of us
would have called a fool, and now what all of us would have called a
failure.

A studious bent, a wide and unregulated way of reading, a vague, inexact

and untrained habit of mentality, took young Halsey, as it does many
another unformed mind, into studies of social problems for which he was
but little fitted, to wit: into imaginings about human democracy, the
inherent rights of man, and much other like folly. The questions of
socialism, the rights and wrongs of capital, the initiative, the referendum
and the recall; the direct primary, the open shop, and the living wage scale
under the American standard—all these and many other things occupied
him as much as tangents, curves and logarithms. As a result of his inchoate
research, he started out in young manhood well seized of the belief—finely
expressed in a certain immortal but wholly ignored document known in our
own history—that there is a certain evenness in human nature before the
eyes of the Lord.

A young engineer with small salary, and a theoretical cast of mind, even
though he reads text-books out of hours, has only himself to trust for his
upward climb in life. Surely he might be better occupied in wondering
rather about his pull with the boss than about the eyes of the Lord as
bearing upon the future of this republic. But, at any rate, such was the plight
of young Mr. Halsey. And, such being the nature and disposition of the
doorstep-frequenting young, it chanced that, although Grace Rawn really
was not yet fledged beyond the blue-tip stage of her final feathering, and
although Mr. Halsey of the Engineering, draftsman, himself still lacked the
main quills which support a man in his ultimate flight through life, they
came more and more to meet each other; after which, each in separate
fashion came to enjoy the meeting and to look forward to the next.

It was not unusual for Mr. Halsey, faring homeward from the office, to
meet Grace, also faring home, at the turn of the car track on Olive Street.
Taking the same car they would travel, somewhat shy and silent, until they
reached the distant corner where those bound for Kelly Row must leave the
car. Then, himself obliged by this to walk perhaps a mile farther, he would
join her, still shy and more or less silent; and so perhaps again wander to
that certain door in Kelly Row where by that time, perhaps, both Mr. Rawn
and his helpmeet were sitting on the narrow porch. He was always welcome
there, because Rawn knew him for a steady chap; and because, in Halsey's
eyes, John Rawn was considerable of a personage. Rawn was aways ready
to be consulted by the young, and, like most failures, was not averse to
giving abundant good advice to others as to the problems of success.
Halsey, reserved and not expansive of nature, a poor boy in college, always
had had a social world as narrow as this of Kelly Row; so that after all the
parties of both the first and the second part were traveling mostly in their
own class. On the whole it was rather a dour assemblage, that on the porch
in Kelly Row. None seemed to have any definite plan or to suspect another
of plan. Life simply was running on, in the bisque shepherdess, china dog,
Dying Gaul and Rock of Ages way.

Let us except John Rawn. He now had certain wide plans of his own, as
we shall see—indeed, as we have seen—and these had somewhat to do with
young Mr. Halsey himself.
 Mr. Halsey himself was disposed at times rather to moroseness, not yet
having discovered the full relation of liver and soul—a delicate and intimate
association. Sometimes despair oppressed him.

"Once in a while I get an idea," said he, one evening, "and I think it
might make good if I had a chance to put it over. But what's the use? I
couldn't do anything with the best idea in the world, because I have no time
nor money to work one out. I tell you, you've got to have money or pull to
get anywhere to-day. This country's getting into a bad way. It doesn't look
quite right to me, I tell you, the way human beings are ground under to-
day."

And yet it was out of precisely such talk as this that John Rawn
originally got the reason for the enthusiastic conversation with his wife
which earlier has been chronicled. Behold the difference among men! Here
was one who wanted to set all the world right, to discover some panacea by
which all men might rest in happiness for ever, by which all men might
succeed, might indeed prove themselves free and equal, and entitled to, say,
ten minutes out of the twenty-four hours for the pursuit of happiness—
innocent happiness, such as reading books on electricity, socialism, the
steaming quality of coke, or the tortional strength of I-beams laid in
concrete. Here also, one lift above him on the doorstep of Kelly Row, was
another man, John Rawn, who, thinking he was full of ideas, had none, but
who had every confidence in himself; a man who early in his youth had
proved his ability to leave to others the skin of their bananas while he
himself took the meat, and paid naught therefor. Not much of a stage, thus
set in Kelly Row. But this is the stage as it was set.

VI

Among these, there was one idea waiting to be born. For, look you, the
air is full of ideas—even as John Rawn in ignorant truthfulness had said.
They float all about us, unborn children in the ether of the universe, waiting
to be born, selecting this or that of us—you, me, gently, for a parent; the
most of them to be pushed back unknown, unrecognized, into the frustrate
void, and so left to await a better time. I doubt not that, at this time or that,
each of us has had offered to him, thus gently, thus unknown, some idea
which would have made any of us great, set us far above our fellow-man;
ideas which for all of that, perhaps would have revolutionized the world.
But we did not know them. What great things are left unborn, what great
discoveries remain unmade, no man may measure. We do not lay hold upon
that thin and vaporous hand which touches our shoulder. We do not wrestle
unwearied with the angel unto the coming of the dawn. So we go on,
bruised and broken, and at length buried and forgot, most of us never
grasping these unseen things, not even having a hint of their immaterial
presences. It is only as the jest-loving fates have it that, once in a while,
something in revolutionary thought drops to earth, is caught by some
materialistic mind, bred up by some materialistic hand.

It must have been first at some chance meeting here on the doorstep in
Kelly Row that young Halsey let drop reference to an idea. It was the
whisper of some passing wing in the universal ether, but he did not know
that. It is not always the mind of the idealist which produces. But now this
thin, faint, mystic sound had fallen upon the material mind of John Rawn,
covetous, eager, receptive of any hint to further his own interest, concerned
not in the least with science, not in the least with altruism, troubling not in
the least over the fate of this republic or the welfare of mankind, concerned
only with his own fate, interested only in his own welfare. Whereupon John
Rawn—barring that certain prophetic outburst of his egotism with which he
favored his wife but recently—in silence had accepted this sign and taken it
as his own, devised for his use and behoof, and for that of none other than
himself.

VII

This difference, then, lay between Rawn of the Personal Injury

department of the railway office, and Halsey of the drafting offices; Rawn
believed in himself, Halsey had not yet figured out whether or not he
believed in anything. They met on the doorstep at Kelly Row, and out of
their meeting many things began in Kelly Row which matured swiftly
elsewhere, and in surprising fashion.

We now come on, sufficiently swiftly, to the history of the birth and
organization of the International Power Company, Limited; a concern which
grew out of nothing except the five factors of survival—environment,
heredity, variation, selection and isolation. Its cradle was in Kelly Row.

CHAPTER VIII
POWER

"Charles," said John Rawn one evening, with that directness of habit
which perhaps we have earlier noted, "I have been thinking over some
scientific problems."

"Yes?" replied Halsey. "What is it—a patent car coupler? There isn't a
fellow in our office who hasn't patented one, but I didn't know it was quite
so catching as to get into the Personal Injury department—they only settle
with the widows there."

"In my belief," went on Rawn, frowning at this flippancy, "I am upon the
eve of a great success, Charles."

"What sort of success, Mr. Rawn?" inquired Halsey, more soberly.

Rawn smiled largely. "You will hardly credit me when I tell you, almost
all sorts of success! To make it short, I have formed a power company—a
concern for the cheap generation and general transmission of power. In the
course of a few months we'll proceed in the manufacture of electrical
transmitters and receivers for what I call the lost current of electricity."
 Halsey stood cold for a moment, and looked at him in amazement.

"You don't mean to say—why, that's precisely what I've been thinking of
for so long."

"I don't doubt many have been thinking of it," rejoined Rawn. "It had to
come. These things seem to happen in cycles. It's almost a toss-up what
man will first perfect an invention when once it gets in the air, so to speak.
Now, this invention of mine has been due ever since the developments in
wireless transmission. In truth, I may say that I have only gone a little
beyond the wireless idea. What I have done is to separate the two currents
of electricity."

Halsey leaned against the wall. "My God!" he half whispered. He smiled
foolishly.

"Why, Mr. Rawn," he said finally, "I've been studying that, I don't know
how long—ever since the researches in my university were made public. I
thought for some time I might be able to figure it out further than our
professors have as yet. Pflüger, of Bonn, in Germany, has been working for
years and years on that theory of perpetual motion in all molecules."

"Mollycules? I don't know as I ever really saw any," hesitated Rawn.

"Very likely, Mr. Rawn!"

"I've never cared much for mere scientific rot," said Rawn, coloring a
trifle. "That gets us nothing. But what were you saying?"

Halsey's enthusiasm carried him beyond resentment and amusement

alike.

"Molecules are everywhere, in everything, Mr. Rawn," he explained

gently; "and now we know they move, though we can see them only in
mass and as though motionless."

"I don't see how that can be," began Rawn; but checked himself.
 Halsey smote his hand against the solid wall. "It moves!" he exclaimed.
"It's alive! It vibrates—every solid is in perpetual motion. The dance of the
molecules is endless. It's in the air around us, above us—power, power—
immeasurable, irresistible power, exhaustless, costless power! All you have
to do is to jar it out of balance."

"Yes, I know. That's what I've been getting at, precisely—"

"I was going to figure it out sometime," said Halsey ruefully.

"I did figure it out!" said John Rawn sententiously. "Moreover, I've got
the company formed."

II

"You—Mr. Rawn? How did you manage that? I didn't know that you—"
Halsey at last spoke.

"A great many haven't known about a great many things," said Rawn,
walking up and down, his hands in his pockets, his air gloomily dignified.
"A few men always have to do the things which others don't know about.
For instance, what did all the work of your professors—what-d'ye-call-'ems
—amount to? Nothing at all. Maybe they'd print a paper about it. That
would about end it, just as it ended it for you. You admit you got the idea
from them; but I say it wasn't any idea at all. I saw it—in the papers. Didn't
pay much attention to it, because there's nothing in this scientific business
for practical men like me."

"I know, I know," Halsey nodded. "That's true. Here it all is." He took
from his coat pocket a creased and folded newspaper page of recent date.
"Here's the story—I was proud, because it was my own university did the
work:

"'That the molecules composing all material substances are constantly in

rapid motion, ricocheting against one another in the manner of a collection
of billiard-balls suddenly stirred up, the speed of the air's components being
about half that of a cannon ball, was the proof announced to-day from the
University of Chicago as a further development of the experiments by
Professor R. A. Threlkeld, which for the last year have been attracting the
attention of scientists from all parts of the world. The absolute nature of the
proof, upon which physicists all over the world have been working without
result for several years, was assented to by Professor Pflüger, of Bonn
University, Germany, who arrived in Chicago last Monday to witness the
demonstration.'"

He paused in his literal reading from the printed page. "I told you about
Pflüger," he began.

"Yes, some Dutchman," assented Rawn graciously. "They're great to

dig."

Halsey, being in the presence of the man whom he proposed making his
father-in-law, was perforce polite, although indignant. He went on icily,
with his reading, since he had begun it:

"'The belief that the molecules of which all matter is composed are in a
perpetual dance of motion has been held tentatively by scientists for several
years, but, owing to the general inability to make any progress in proving it,
considerable skepticism has developed among the physicists of several of
the leading scientific nations. It was generally known as the kinetic theory.
Professor Threlkeld's proof is a further development of his experiments,
showing electricity to be a definite substance, which were announced last
year and were pronounced the most important discovery concerning the
nature of electricity since Benjamin Franklin.

"'The simple expedient of performing his experiments in almost a

complete vacuum—a method which had not occurred to scientists before—
was given by Professor Threlkeld as the foundation stone of his discovery.
Minute drops of oil, sprayed into a vacuum chamber, one side of which is of
glass, demonstrate by their own motions the truth of the theory.

"'Surrounded by the ordinary amount of air, the oil drops are bombarded
by moving air molecules in so many thousand places at once that their
motion is so rapid as to be invisible. With few molecules of air surrounding
them, the drops are driven back and forth as though being used as a
punching-bag.

"'By reference to his previous experiments with drops of oil bombarded

by electrical ions, the motion of the oil drops has been found to be precisely
the same, showing the cause of the motion to be similar in both cases.'"

"That's all right," said John Rawn, "all very well as far as it goes, but it
doesn't go far enough."

III

Halsey smiled. "Well, here's what the discoverer says about it," he
commented. "I reckon that's plain, too, as far as it goes:

"'For the benefit of the general public, Professor Threlkeld has prepared
the following statement concerning the experiments he has been
conducting:

"'"The method consisted in catching atmospheric ions upon minute oil

drops floating in the air and measuring the electrical charge which the drops
thus acquired. This year the following extensions of this work have been
made:

"'"The action of ionization itself is now being studied, each of the two
electrical fragments into which a neutral molecule breaks up being caught
upon oil drops at the instant of formation. This study has shown that the act
of ionization of a neutral air molecule always consists in the detachment
from it of one single elementary charge rather than of two or three such
charges.

"'"By suspending these minute oil drops in rarefied gases instead of in

air at atmospheric pressure, the authors have been able to make the oil
drops partake of the motions of agitation of the molecules to such an extent
that they can be seen by any observer to dance violently under the
bombardment which they receive from the flying air molecules.

"'"By measuring accurately the amount of the motion of agitation of the

oil drops and comparing it with the motions which they assume under the
influence of an electrical field because of the charge which they carry, the
authors have been able to make an exact and certain identification, with the
aid of computations made by Mr. Fletcher, of the electrical charge carried
by an atmospheric ion (and measured in their preceding work), with the
electrical charge carried by univalent ions in solution.

"'"This work not only supplies complete proof of the correctness of the
atomic theory of electricity, but gives a much more satisfactory
demonstration than had before been found of the perpetual dance of the
molecules of matter."'"*

*With but a change of name, Mr. Halsey quoted literally from the journal
—The Author.

IV

"Fine! Fine! Charley!" interrupted Rawn sardonically. "Everybody's read

that who cared to read it. It's too dry for most folks. It's public; it's wide
open, no secret about it. But who wants it? What use has a mollycule and a
drop of oil in a glass jar got in actual business? What ice does it cut?"

"I know—I know, Mr. Rawn; very little indeed. But, one idea grows out
of another. Now, what I was experimenting with was this same second
current of electricity—whatever it is. It's got something to do—I don't just
know what—with this same movement of the molecules. Now, can't you
see, something has got to move them. If you've got perpetual motion,
you've got a perpetual power somewhere back at it, and a power that is
endless, universal—
 "Mr. Rawn," he resumed earnestly, "when I got that far along, I got to—
well—sort of dreaming! I followed that dance of the atoms on out—into the
universe—into the manifestation of—"

"Well, of what?"

"Of God! Of Providence! Of Something, whatever it is that begins and

perpetuates; something that plans! Something that created. Something that
intends life and comfort and joy for the things It created."

Rawn eyed him coldly. "Charley," said he, "you're talking tommyrot!
You can't run this world into the spiritual world. That's wrong. It's
irreligious. Besides, it's rot."

Halsey hardly heard him. "So then I began to wonder what we'd find yet,
when we had that vast, universal power all for our own—all for man, you
know, Mr. Rawn. Living's hard to-day, Mr. Rawn. There's a lot of injustice
in the world nowadays. So—well, I wondered if it weren't nearly time that
things should change. We've always moved on up—or thought we did,
anyhow—so why shouldn't we keep on moving, keep on making
discoveries?"

"That's what I thought, Charley!"

—"Something that would lighten the world's labor, and give the world
more time to think, more time to grow—to enjoy—well, to love, you know
—"

"Charley, you're nothing better than a damned Socialist! You're siding

with the lower classes. Labor!—There's always got to be labor, long as the
world lasts—always has been and always will be. And some do that sort of
work, while others don't. There are differences among men. Look at those
professors—look at you! A mollycule in a glass jar—what'd it get you? Did
any of you form a company for the perpetual sale of something that's
everlasting and that don't cost anything? You didn't. But I did."

"Yes. And it was my dream—but not as you state it, Mr. Rawn. I didn't
want to sell it. I wanted to give it. I wanted to do something for the people,
for humanity—for the country—you see. That is—"

"Humanity be damned!" broke in John Rawn brutally. "You can't do

anything for humanity—you can't make the weak men strong—it's God
A'mighty does that, Charley. Give it away, eh? Well, let me have the second
current that costs nothing, and let me sell it for ever at my own price—and I
reckon I'll let you and your professor and Mr. Dutchman, whatever his
name is, trail along any way you like with your mollycule in the glass jar. I
want canned power—definite, marketable, something you can wrap up in a
package and sell, do you understand—sell to those same laboring men that
you're wasting your sympathy on. Work for yourself, my son, remember
that; never mind about humanity. And I'll give you a chance, Charley—in
my company," he added.

VI

"Is it a big company?" queried Halsey wearily.

"Twenty-five million dollars," answered John Rawn calmly. And it is to

be remembered that at this time John Rawn was drawing a salary of one
hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, the highest pay he had ever
received in all his life; also that he was at this time a man forty-seven years
of age. We have classes in America, but occasionally the lines that separate
one from the other prove susceptible of successful attack at the hands of a
determined man. As Rawn stood before Halsey, who only goggled and
gasped at such statements as his last, he seemed a determined man.

"We are going to dam the Mississippi River, a couple of hundred miles
above here at the ledges," Rawn remarked casually. "For the time, that will
be our central power plant. We will contract for a million and a half dollars'
worth of power each year in St. Louis alone. That comes down by regular
wire transmission. That is nothing, it's only a drop in the bucket. Our big
killing is going to be with the other scheme—the second current—the same
idea you've been trifling with. We'll go East with that."

"You seem to mean almost what I mean, when I talked with you long
ago—"

"Do you think so?" Rawn's tone was affable and he held out his hand. "I
should be happy indeed to think that we had been studying along the same
lines, Charles. That will enable you all the better to understand my own
ideas and my business plans. Of course—and I'll be frank with you, Charles
—Mrs. Rawn and I have doubted the wisdom of Grace's engagement to a
young man without means or prospects. But I can give you prospects, and
you can make your own means. I'll put you in our central factory. We need
good men, of course, and I need you especially, Charles. In fact, I've had
you in my eye."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, I shall be president of the concern."

Halsey smiled sardonically. "The difference between men!"

"Pardon me, but you seem to think that you ought to stand in my shoes
in this matter, Charles. I don't recall any warrant for that." Rawn spoke with
asperity, aggrieved. "Of course, we speak loosely of certain things, all of us,
and all of us have unformed wishes, all that sort of thing. I'm willing to
admit, too, as I said before, that when the time comes for a great idea to be
discovered, it may be almost by accident that it is discovered by this man or
that.

"But now, as I take it, Charles," he continued, "you never had any
definite and exact idea of handling the unattuned current of electricity
which runs free in the air, and which—according to my theory—can be
taken down by the proper receivers and used locally—harnessed, set to
work; and retailed at a price. That's the wireless idea, of course, in one
form. It's the one big thing left for big business to discover. There's nothing