man raised his hands, and silence fell, and he began again.

"I plead with you," he said, "whoever you may be, provided that you care
about the truth; but most of all I plead with working-man, with those
to whom the evils I portray are not mere matters of sentiment, to be
dallied and toyed with, and then perhaps put aside and forgotten--to
whom they are the grim and relentless realities of the daily grind, the
chains upon their limbs, the lash upon their backs, the iron in their
souls. To you, working-men! To you, the toilers, who have made this
land, and have no voice in its councils! To you, whose lot it is to sow
that others may reap, to labor and obey, and ask no more than the wages
of a beast of burden, the food and shelter to keep you alive from day to
day. It is to you that I come with my message of salvation, it is to you
that I appeal. I know how much it is to ask of you--I know, for I have
been in your place, I have lived your life, and there is no man before
me here tonight who knows it better. I have known what it is to be a
street-waif, a bootblack, living upon a crust of bread and sleeping in
cellar stairways and under empty wagons. I have known what it is to dare
and to aspire, to dream mighty dreams and to see them perish--to see all
the fair flowers of my spirit trampled into the mire by the wild-beast
powers of my life. I know what is the price that a working-man pays for
knowledge--I have paid for it with food and sleep, with agony of body
and mind, with health, almost with life itself; and so, when I come to
you with a story of hope and freedom, with the vision of a new earth to
be created, of a new labor to be dared, I am not surprised that I find
you sordid and material, sluggish and incredulous. That I do not despair
is because I know also the forces that are driving behind you--because
I know the raging lash of poverty, the sting of contempt and mastership,
'the insolence of office and the spurns.' Because I feel sure that in
the crowd that has come to me tonight, no matter how many may be dull
and heedless, no matter how many may have come out of idle curiosity, or
in order to ridicule--there will be some one man whom pain and suffering
have made desperate, whom some chance vision of wrong and horror has
startled and shocked into attention. And to him my words will come like
a sudden flash of lightning to one who travels in darkness--revealing
the way before him, the perils and the obstacles--solv