The next on the Calendar, Bill No. 5, concerned the notice which must be given before discharge of employés. Now notice. The great majority of the citizens of the Town Meeting are workers with their hands—laborers, and sympathetic with labor; yet they defeated that bill, because it was unfair and impractical.
The Town Meeting takes itself very seriously, and so must you when you organize one. It doesn’t for a moment think it is just playing at life. It studies these questions and then seeks to translate its decisions into civic action. For example, after deciding that a certain policy was for the best interest of the city, it memorialized the city to that end. The city authorities heard our arguments, and the matter is now laid over awaiting the settlement of certain questions upon which our question depends. As far as this point is concerned it makes no difference what the city eventually does with our memorial. The point is that the city takes us as seriously as we take ourselves.
Have I told you enough to give you the spirit and genius of the Ford Hall Town Meeting? You can see how it gives training in parliamentary practice and debate. You see how it educates in the finer graces of club life and intercourse. You can see how its committee activities can weld workers together. You can see how its investigations of city conditions are truly educational, how they train the citizens for usefulness to the state.
Have I justified the insertion of this description of the Ford Hall Town Meeting in a book on Debating for Boys?
I have told you about it because all your debating and all your clubs won’t be worth much to you unless you catch the same spirit of applied democracy, of brotherhood—the spirit that has gripped the Ford Hall Folks. Truly they were baptized with a passion for it. They found it here after great suffering and trial. You boys can govern your lives by the same spirit; you can fill your lives with the same service.
So after you have tried yourselves out in the regular debating clubs, organize a Town Meeting, or do it now if you feel the kindling of the idea strongly enough. Everything I have said about debating applies to the work of the Town Meeting as well as that of the debating society. And even more than that of the club is the work of the Town Meeting related to real life, preparation for which is the aim of this book.