"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.
Dulac shouted, demanded their attention. He might as well have tried to still the breakers that roared upon a rocky shore. Dulac did not care for money. He was a revolutionist, a thinker, a man whose work lay with conditions, not with individuals. Here every man was thinking as an individual; applying that five dollars a day to his own peculiar, personal affairs…. Already men were hurrying out of the hall to carry the amazing tidings home to their wives.
Dulac stormed on.