"You give me the wages of a clodhopper and ask me to prepare a table fit for a king. Well, try it, and see what you get." He sat down repeating his threat in a series of endless announcements to the people around him. "I think he'll poison us all if you pass this law," Barbara whispered. "The farmers will run us through with their pitchforks if we don't," he laughed. "Poisoning is the easier way," she sighed. The leader of the brass band raised the biggest row of all. From the first these men had refused to lift their hand to do a thing except to play at stated hours each day and furnish the music for the three evenings of social amusement. "You place me on an equality with the lout who holds a calf or the clodhopper who holds a plough--I, who feed the soul with ravishing melody--I, who lift man from earth to heaven on the wings of angels!" The band leader swelled with righteous wrath and sat down beside the cook who was still muttering incoherently: "Let 'em try it--and see what they get!" Yet, in spite of the fierce threats of the cook, the scrubwoman, the drainman, the musician, and all the high-salaried favourites of labour, the inevitable occurred. When put to a vote equal wages were established by an overwhelming majority. Each member of the colony, man, woman, and child, was voted free food, clothes, and shelter, and a credit of five hundred dollars a year at the Brotherhood store. The executive council was abolished and in its place a board of governors established, composed of the heads of each department of labour and presided over by two regents, a man and a woman, elected by the general assembly. Norman and Barbara were elected regents without opposition, and the old heads of each department of labour placed on the board of governors to serve until the approaching annual election. The assembly proposed: "Article I. of the constitution of the new State of Ventura as follows: "Every citizen of the State must labour according to his ability. Those who can work and will not shall be made to work." No man who voted this simple and obviously just law could dream of the tremendous results. It was merely the enactment into statutory law of the first principle of an effective Socialism: "From every man according to his ability, unto every man according to his needs." The first obvious requirement of such a law was an immediate increase of the police and detective force at the command of the regents and the board of governors. Norman thanked the assembly for the promptness and thoroughness which had characterized their work, and closed his congratulations with a sentence of peculiarly sinister meaning to the man who had ears to hear. "Hereafter, comrades, we can move forward without another pause. There can never be another strike on the island of Ventura. The State is now supreme."