There was a hush for a moment. Then the guest carried his chair to the extreme front edge of the platform.
“I don't know just what sort of meeting this is--I have not been fully informed,” he said, very crisply. “But I want it distinctly understood that I am not here to make any speech. Your faces indicate that you are very much in earnest in regard to the business you are met to consider. I am assured that this is no mere political rally?”
“I'm glad of that. I am not in politics. The political mess grows to be nastier every year. But what are you here for? Come, now! Come! Let's talk it over.” He was a bit brusque, but his tone was kindly.
A man who stood up in the middle of the hall was rather shabby in his attire, but he had the deep eyes of one who thinks.
“Honored sir,” he said, “I don't stand up as one presuming to speak for all the rest. But I have talked with many men. I know what some of us want. We don't expect that laws or leaders will make lazy men get ahead in the world or that victuals can be legislated into the cupboard without a man gets out and hustles for 'em. I have worked at a bench ever since I was fourteen. I expect to work there until I drop out. I don't want any political office. I couldn't fill one. But why is it that the only men who get into office are the kind who turn around and get rich selling off property which belongs to all of us--I mean the franchises for this, that, and the other?” He sat down.
“Honorable Archer Converse, one franchise that was given away by those men years ago was the right to furnish water to this city. A private concern got hold of that franchise. It holds the right to-day. It saves money by pumping its water out of the Gamonic River. Saves money and wastes lives. The Board of Health's reports show that there were eleven hundred cases of typhoid fever in this city last year. In my family my mother and two of my children died. I shiver every time I touch a tap--but spring-water that can be depended on costs us at the grocer's a dollar for a five-gallon carboy--and my wages are only ten dollars a week. There are lakes twenty miles from this city. Pure water there for all of us! But every tap drips sewage from the Gamonic River. Haven't we got any leaders who will make that water company pump health instead of death?”