Men have not learned that we must come to
understand the impulse toward order, have that burned into our
consciousness, before we move on to other things. There is in us this
madness for individual expression. For each of us the little moment of
running forward and lifting our thin childish voices in the midst of
the great silence. We have not learned that out of us all, walking
shoulder to shoulder, there might arise a greater voice, something to
make the waters of the very seas to tremble.
McGregor knew. He had a mind not sick with much thinking of trifles.
When he had a great idea he thought it would work and he meant to see
that it did work.
Mightily was he equipped. I have seen the man in halls talking, his
huge body swaying back and forth, his great fists in the air, his
voice harsh, persistent, insistent--with something of the quality of
the drums in it--beating down into the upturned faces of the men
crowded into the stuffy little places.
I remember that newspaper men used to sit in their little holes and
write saying of him that the times made McGregor. I do not know about
that. The city caught fire from the man at the time of that terrible
speech of his in the court room when Polk Street Mary grew afraid and
told the truth. There he stood, the raw untried red-haired miner from
the mines and the Tenderloin, facing an angry court and a swarm of
protesting lawyers and uttering that city-shaking philippic against
the old rotten first ward and the creeping cowardice in men that lets
vice and disease go on and pervade all modern life.
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