"Suffer little children!"
"Remember the Sabbath day!" and like derisive calls, mingled with a laugh and distinct hisses. The gavel beat in vain; Avery waited. At last there was silence, and he said: "I was not joking. The fact that you all know me as a freethinker misled you; but although I did say that I wished to take as a sort of text a passage from the Bible, I was in earnest. This is the text: 'The rich man's wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty.' Again there was a laugh, with a different ring to it, and clapping of hands.
"I think that I may assume," he went on, "that no audience before which I am likely to appear, will suspect me of accepting the Bible as altogether admirable. Some of the prophets and holy men of old, as I read of their doings in the scriptures, always impress me as having been long overdue at the penitentiary."
There was laughter and applause at this sally, and the intangible something which emanates from an audience which tells a speaker that he now has a mental grasp upon his hearers, made itself felt. The slight air of resentment which arose when he had said that he should refer for his authority to the Bible subsided, and he went on.
"But notwithstanding these facts and opinions, one sometimes finds in the Bible things that are true. Sometimes they are not only true, but they are also good. Again they are good in fact, in sentiment, and in diction. Now when this sort of conjunction occurs, I am strongly moved to drop for the time such differences as I may have with other portions and sentiments, and give due credit where credit is due.
"Therefore, when I find in the tenth chapter of Proverbs this: 'The rich man's wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty,' I shake hands with the author, and travel with him for this trip at least. The prophet does not say that their destruction is ignorance, or vice, or sin, or any of the ordinary blossoms of poverty which it is the fashion to refer to as its root. He tells us the truth—the destruction of the poor is their poverty.
"And who are the poor? Are they not those who, in spite of their labor, their worth, and their value to the state as good citizens are still dependent upon the good-will—the charity, I had almost said—of someone else who has power over the very food they have earned a hundred times over, and the miserable rags they are allowed to wear instead of the broadcloth they have earned? Are they not those who, because of economic conditions, are suppliants where they should be sovereign citizens, dependents where they should be free and independent and self-respecting persons?"
"Right you are!" "Drive it home!" came with the applause from the audience.
"Are they not those who must obey oppressive laws made by those who legislate against the helpless and in favor of the powerful? Are they not those whose voices are silenced by subjection, whose wishes and needs are trampled beneath the feet of the controlling class?"
The applause was ready now and instant. Avery paused. There was silence. "And who are these?" he asked, and paused again.