Other department stores wanted the twelve thousand to come to them.  They announced the one price.

Hardware stores did it.  Groceries announced one price.  Then everybody.

Not all the clergymen in America, preaching every Sunday for months, could have done very much in the way of seriously touching the imagination of the crowd on the moral unworthiness, the intellectual degradation, the national danger of picking out the one thing that nearly all the people all do, and had to do, all day, every day, and making that thing mean, incompetent, and small.  No one had thought out what it would lead to, and how monstrous and absurd it was and would always be to have a nation have all its people taking every little thing all day, every day, that they were buying, or that they were selling—­taking a spool of thread, for instance—­and packing it, or packing their action with it, as full of adulterated motives and of fresh and original ways of not doing as they would be done by as they could think up—­a little innocent spool of thread—­wreaking all their sins and kinds of sins on it, breaking every one of the ten commandments on it as an offering....

It was A.T.  Stewart, a very ordinary-looking, practical man in a plain, everyday business, who arrested the attention of a nation and changed the habit of thought and trend of mind of a great people, and made them a candid, direct people, a people that went with great sunny prairies and high mountains, a yea and nay people, straightforward, and free from palavering forever.  A.T.  Stewart was accustomed, in his own personal dealings from day to day, to cut people short when they tried to heckle with him.  He liked to take things for granted, drive through to the point, and go on to the next one.  This might have ended, of course, in a kind of cul de sac of being a merely personal trait in a clean-cut, manful, straightforward American gentleman; and if Stewart had been a snob or a Puritan, or had felt superior, or if he had thought other people—­the great crowds of them who flocked through his store—­could never expect to be as good as he was, nothing would ever have come of it.

It is not likely that he was conscious of the long train of spiritual results he had set in motion; of the way he had taken the habit of mind, the daily, hourly psychology of a great people, and had wrought it through with his own spirit; or of the way he had saved up, and set where it could be used, everyday religion in America, and had freed the business genius of a nation for its most characteristic and most effective self-expression.

He merely was conscious that he could not endure palavering in doing business himself, and that he would not submit to being obliged to endure it, and he believed millions of people in America were as clean-cut and straightforward as he was.

And the millions of people stood by him.

Perhaps A.T.  Stewart touched the imagination of the crowd because he had let the crowd touch his and had seen what crowds, in spite of appearances, were really like.