Shopkeepers restlessly pacing the sidewalk before the doors of their neglected stores informed Phil of the meeting at the court-room, and of the panicky rumors. No good reason occurred to Phil for absenting herself from a mass meeting at which her Uncle Alec was to speak. Phil liked meetings. From the crest of a stack of chicken crates near the freight depot she had heard Albert Jeremiah Beveridge speak when that statesman had vouchsafed ten minutes to the people of Montgomery the preceding autumn. She had heard such redoubtable orators as William Jennings Bryan, Charles Warren Fairbanks, and "Tom" Marshall, and when a Socialist had spoken from the court-house steps on a rainy evening, Phil, then in her last year in high school, had been the sole representative of her sex in the audience. Waterman was laboriously approaching his peroration when she reached the packed court-room. Men were wedged tightly into the space reserved for the court officials and the bar, and a number stood on the clerk's desk. She climbed upon a chair at the back of the room, the better to see and hear. There were other women and girls present--employees of the furniture factory--but it must be confessed that even without their support Phil would not have been embarrassed. Waterman was in fine fettle, and cheers and applause punctuated his discourse. "I am not here to arouse class hatred, or to set one man against another. We of Montgomery are all friends and neighbors. Many of you have lived here, just as I have, throughout your lives. It is for us to help each other in a neighborly spirit. Factories may close their doors, banks may fail, and credit be shaken, but so long as we may appeal to each other in the old terms of neighborliness and comradeship, nothing can seriously disturb our peace and prosperity. "It grieves me, however, to be obliged to confess that there are men among us who have not felt the responsibility imposed upon them as trustees for the less fortunate. I have already touched on the immediate plight of those of you who are thrown out of employment, with your just labor claims unpaid. There are others--and some of them are perhaps in this room--who entrusted their savings to the Sycamore Traction Company, and who are now at the mercy of the malevolent powers that invariably control and manipulate such corporations. I shall not be personal; I have no feelings against any of those men. But I say to you, men and women of Montgomery, that when I heard this morning from the lips of an industrious and frugal German mechanic that a certain financier of this town had bought from him a traction bond that represented twenty years of savings--then my blood boiled with righteous indignation.