All the girls were in their seats. There were only Rose and one or two more on the platform. The hall was low and smoky. The girls were nervous about the doors, and questioned everybody that came in. The girl at the door began to question me when I went in, but Rose saw me.
"Let her come in," she called out. "She's our next speaker!"
And when I heard the ring in her voice, and saw her face and felt her hand close on mine, and knew how glad she was that I had come, I was happy. Happier than I had ever once been at the Massys'.
I went right up on the platform. And my head and my heart had never been so full of things to say. And the girls listened.
Did you ever face a roomful of girls who work in a factory? Any factory? But especially in a factory where, instead of treating them like one side of the business, the owners treat them like necessary evils? You wouldn't ever have supposed that the heads of the Carney factory were dependent the least bit on the girls who did the work for them. You'd have thought that it was just money and machinery and the buildings that did the work, and that the girls were being let work for a kindness. I never could understand it. When the business needed more money, the owners gave it to it. When the machinery needed oil or repairs or new parts, it got them. When the buildings had to have improvements, they got them. But when the girls needed more light or air or wages or shorter hours or a cleaner place to be, or better safety, they just got laughed at and rowed at and told to learn their places, or not told anything at all. And more girls come, younger, fresher, that didn't need things.
"If I was only my machine," I had heard Rose say that night, "I'd have plenty of oil and wool and the right shuttles. But I'm nothing but the operator, and the machine has the best care. And if there comes a fire—the machinery is insured. But we ain't."
I have not much remembrance of what I said to the girls that night. There must have been a hundred of them in the hall. And I know that as I stood there, looking into their faces, knowing them as I knew them, with their striving for a life like other folks, there—suddenly ringed round them—I saw the double tier of boxes of the night before, and I heard his voice:
" ... This whole place here, and we with them, are on the chests of the others."
I had no bitterness. But I had the extreme of consciousness that I had ever reached—not of myself, but of all of us, and of the need of helping on our common growth. They were to stand together, inviolably together, for the fostering of that growth, I told them. An injury to one was an injury to them all—because they were together. And the employers of whom they made their demands were no enemies, but victims, too, who must be helped to see, by us who happen to have had the good fortune to be able to see the need first.