The meeting was silent.  It was nonplused.  It was listening to the impossible.  Every man, every employee, should be paid five dollars a day!

“Does that mean common labor?”

“It means everyone,” said Bonbright.  “It means the man who sweeps out the office, the man who runs the elevator, the man who digs a ditch.  Every man does his share and every man shall have his share.

“I want every man to live in decent comfort, and I want his wife and babies to live in comfort.  With these wages no man’s wife need take in washing nor work out by the day to help support the family.  No man will need to ask his wife to keep a boarder to add to the family’s earnings. ...”

The men listened now.  Bonbright’s voice carried to every corner and cranny of the hall.  Even the men on the platform listened breathlessly as he went on detailing the plan and its workings.  Nothing like this had ever happened before in the world’s history.  No such offer had ever been made to workingmen by an employer capable of carrying out his promises. ...  He told them what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it.  He told them what he wanted them to do to co-operate with him—­of an advisory board to be elected by the men, sharing in deliberations that affected the employees, of means to be instituted to help the men to save and to take care of their savings, of a strict eight-hour day. ...  No union had ever dreamed of asking such terms of an employer.

“How do we know you’ll do it?” yelled a man.

“You have my word,” said Bonbright.

“Rats!”

“Shut up... shut up!” the objector was admonished.

“That’s all, men,” Bonbright said.  “Think it over.  This plan is going into effect.  If you want to share in it you can do so, every one of you. ...  Thank you for listening.”

Bonbright turned and sat down in a chair on the platform, anxious, watching that sea of faces, waiting to see what would happen.

Dulac leaped to his feet.  “It’s a bribe,” he shouted.  “It’s nothing but an attempt to buy your manhood for five dollars a day.  We’re righting for a principle—­not for money. ...  We’re—­”

But his voice was drowned out.  The meeting had taken charge of itself.  It wanted to listen to no oratory, but to talk over this thing that had happened, to realize it, to weigh it, to determine what it meant to them.  Abstract principle must always give way to concrete fact.  The men who fight for principle are few.  The fight is to live, to earn, to continue to exist.  Men who had never hoped to earn a hundred dollars a month; men who had for a score of years wielded pick and shovel for two dollars a day or less, saw, with eyes that could hardly believe, thirty dollars a week.  It was wealth!  It was that thirty dollars that gripped them now, not the other things.  Appreciation of them would come later, but now it was the voice of money that was in their ears.  What could a man do with five dollars a day?  He could live—­not merely exist. ...  The thing that could not be had come to pass.