"Here in this hall with us to-night there are others besides ourselves. Each of us from near towns and far cities comes shepherding a cloud of witnesses. Who are these? Say those others, clean and leisured, who live in your town, and yours. Say the school children, that vast, ambiguous host, from your town and yours and yours. Say the laboring children—five hundred thousand of them in the states which you in this room represent—my friends, the laboring children. Say, the seven million and more women workers in your states and mine. Say the men,—the wage earners,—toilers with the hands, multitudes, multitudes, who on the earth and beneath it, in your town and yours and yours, are at labor now, that we may be here—clean and at leisure. I tell you they are all here, sitting with us, shadowy. And the immediate concerns of these are the immediate concerns of us. And social work is the development of the chance for all of us to participate more abundantly in our common need to live.
"As fast as in you lies, let your civic societies look farther than conserving or planting or beautifying, or even cleaning. Give these things to committees—important committees. And turn you to the fundamentals. Turn to the industries and to the government and to the schools of your towns and there work, for there lie the hidings of your power. Here are the great tasks of the time: The securing of economic justice for labor, the liberation of women, and the great deliverances: From war, from race prejudice, from prostitution, from alcohol, and at last from poverty.
"These are the things we have to do. Not they. We. You and I. These are your tasks and mine and the tasks of those who have not our cleanliness nor our leisure, but who will help as fast as ever we learn how to share that help—as fast as ever we all learn how to work as one.... Oh, my friends, we must dream far. We must dream the farthest that folks can go. For life is something other than that which we believe it to be."
When she'd got through, right in the middle of the power and the glory that came in my head, something else flew up and it was:
1. See about having seats put in the County House Yard.
2. See about getting the blankets in the Calaboose washed oftener.
3. See about—and all the rest of them.
And instead, this was what we were for, till all of us have earned the right to something better. This was what we could help to do. It was like the sky had turned into a skylight, and let me look up through....
My seat was on the side corner of the platform, nearest to her. She had spoken last, and everybody was rustling to go. I didn't wait a minute. I went down close beside the footlights and the blue hydrangeas, and held out my letter. And I says: