usiness you are met to consider.
I am assured that this is no mere political rally?"

"No," somebody replied.

"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.

A thin man in the front row got up.

"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?"

"They sent 'Tabulator' Burke up for ballot frauds," said a voter who
stood up in a far corner. "But anybody in this city understands well
enough that the judge who sent him to state prison knew who the real
chaps were, knew how much the real ones paid 'Tabulator' to take the
whole blame. And the governor knows it all and has just reappointed that
judge."

The Honorable Archer Converse sat very straight in his chair and
listened to