At that moment in Zenith, two men sat in a laboratory.  For thirty-seven hours now they had been working on a report of their investigations of synthetic rubber.

At that moment in Zenith, there was a conference of four union officials as to whether the twelve thousand coal-miners within a hundred miles of the city should strike.  Of these men one resembled a testy and prosperous grocer, one a Yankee carpenter, one a soda-clerk, and one a Russian Jewish actor The Russian Jew quoted Kautsky, Gene Debs, and Abraham Lincoln.

At that moment a G. A. R. veteran was dying.  He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods.  He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey’s readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.

At that moment the steel and cement town which composed the factory of the Pullmore Tractor Company of Zenith was running on night shift to fill an order of tractors for the Polish army.  It hummed like a million bees, glared through its wide windows like a volcano.  Along the high wire fences, searchlights played on cinder-lined yards, switch-tracks, and armed guards on patrol.

At that moment Mike Monday was finishing a meeting.  Mr. Monday, the distinguished evangelist, the best-known Protestant pontiff in America, had once been a prize-fighter.  Satan had not dealt justly with him.  As a prize-fighter he gained nothing but his crooked nose, his celebrated vocabulary, and his stage-presence.  The service of the Lord had been more profitable.  He was about to retire with a fortune.  It had been well earned, for, to quote his last report, “Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet with a Punch, has shown that he is the world’s greatest salesman of salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis.  He has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head.”

Of the larger cities of the land, only Zenith had hesitated to submit its vices to Mike Monday and his expert reclamation corps.  The more enterprising organizations of the city had voted to invite him—­Mr. George F. Babbitt had once praised him in a speech at the Boosters’ Club.  But there was opposition from certain Episcopalian and Congregationalist ministers, those renegades whom Mr. Monday so finely called “a bunch of gospel-pushers with dish-water instead of blood, a gang of squealers that need more dust on the knees of their pants and more hair on their skinny old chests.”  This opposition had been crushed when the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had reported to a committee of manufacturers that in every city where he had appeared, Mr. Monday had turned the minds of workmen from wages and hours to higher things, and thus averted strikes.  He was immediately invited.