It was in a way
another "J'Accuse!" from the lips of another Zola. Men who heard it
have told me that when he had finished in the whole court no man spoke
and no man dared feel guiltless. "For the moment something--a section,
a cell, a figment, of men's brains opened--and in that terrible
illuminating instant they saw themselves as they were and what they
had let life become."
They saw something else, or thought they did, saw McGregor a new force
for Chicago to reckon with. After the trial one young newspaper man
returned to his office and running from desk to desk yelled in the
faces of his brother reporters: "Hell's out for noon. We've got a big
red-haired Scotch lawyer up here on Van Buren Street that is a kind of
a new scourge of the world. Watch the First Ward get it."
But McGregor never looked at the First Ward. That wasn't bothering
him. From the court room he went to march with men in a new field.
Followed the time of waiting and of patient quiet work. In the
evenings McGregor worked at the law cases in the bare room in Van
Buren Street. That queer bird Henry Hunt still stayed with him,
collecting tithes for the gang and going to his respectable home at
night--a strange triumph of the small that had escaped the tongue of
McGregor on that day in court when so many men had their names bruited
to the world in McGregor's roll call--the roll call of the men who
were but merchants, brothers of vice, the men who should have been
masters in the city.
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