“Folks,” I says. “Why, folks, Silas. Why, here in this room with you that we say have made Friendship Village, are setting them sixty-one employees of yours that have helped make it too. And all the tens that will come afterward, and that have come before to help to make the village by the work of their hands. They belong--they’re the village. They’re us. Oh, let’s not do things _for_ them--let’s do things _with_ them. Let’s meet all together, employers and employees, men and women, and let’s take up together the job of being a town. Let’s not any of us have more than our share, and then deal out little clubs, and old furniture, and magazines, and games to the rest of us. You men are finding out that all your old catch words about advancing the town and making business opportunities, have got something lacking in them, after all. And us women are beginning to see that twenty houses to a block, each keeping clean and orderly and planted on its own hook, each handing out old clothes and toys down to the Flats, each living its own life of cleanliness and home and victual-giving-at-Christmas, that that ain’t being a town after all. It isn’t enough. Oh, deep inside us all ain’t there something that says, I ain’t you, nor you, nor you, nor five thousand of you. I’m all of you. I’m one. ‘When,’ it says, ‘are you going to understand, that not till I can act like one, one united one, can I give any glimpse whatever of what people might be?’ Don’t let’s us go on advancing business and multiplying our little clubs and philanthropies. Instead, let’s get together--in the kind of meetings they use’ to have in the old first days in America--and let’s just talk over the next step in what’s to become of us. Let’s dream--real far. Let’s dream farther than gift-giving--and on up to wages--and mebbe a good deal farther than that. Let’s dream the farthest that folks could go....” I didn’t know but they’d think I was crazy. But I’d be glad to be that kind of crazy. And the glory is that more folks and more folks are getting crazy the same way. But they didn’t think so--I know they didn’t. Because when I got through, they clapped their hands, hard and hearty--all but Silas, that don’t think a chairman had ought to show any pleased emotion. And times now when I’m lonesome, I like to remember the rest of the talk, and it warms my heart to remember it, and I like to think about it. For we give up having the club. Nobody said much of anything more about it, after we got Silas silenced. And this was the notice we put the next night in the Friendship _Evening Daily_. Nobody knows better than I the long road that there is to travel before we can really do what we dreamed out a little bit about. Nobody better than I knows how slow it is going to be. But I tell you, it is going to be. And the notice we put in the paper was the first little step we took. And I believe that notice holds the heart of to-day. It said: