"Mr. Chairman and gentlemen." He paused, and looked over the room again. "I beg your pardon. I am accustomed to face men only. Mr. Chairman, _ladies_ and gentlemen." There was a ripple of laughter over the room. "Let me say how glad I am to make that amendment, and how glad I shall be, for one, when I am able to make it in the body to which I have the honor to belong--the Legislature." Some one said: "ah, there," but he did not pause. "You labor men have taken the right view of it in this club. There is not a question, not one, in all the domain of labor or legislation which does not strike at woman's welfare as vitally as it does at man's; not one." There was feeble applause. "But I will go further. I will say, there is not only not an economic question which is not _as_ vital to her, but it is far _more_ vital than it is to man. The very fact of her present legal status rests upon the other awful fact of her absolute financial dependence upon men." Someone laughed, and Avery fired up. "This one fact has made sex maniacs of men, and peopled this world with criminals, lunatics, and liars! This one fact! This one fact!" His intensity had at last forced silence, and quieted those members who were at first inclined to take as a gallant joke his opening remarks. "Let me take a text, for what I want to say to you on the economic question, from the Bible. "Oh, give us a rest!" "Suffer little children!" "Remember the Sabbath day!" and like derisive calls, mingled with a laugh and distinct hisses. The gavel beat in vain; Avery waited. At last there was silence, and he said: "I was not joking. The fact that you all know me as a freethinker misled you; but although I did say that I wished to take as a sort of text a passage from the Bible, I was in earnest. This is the text: 'The rich man's wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty.' Again there was a laugh, with a different ring to it, and clapping of hands. "I think that I may assume," he went on, "that no audience before which I am likely to appear, will suspect me of accepting the Bible as altogether admirable. Some of the prophets and holy men of old, as I read of their doings in the scriptures, always impress me as having been long overdue at the penitentiary." There was laughter and applause at this sally, and the intangible something which emanates from an audience which tells a speaker that he now has a mental grasp upon his hearers, made itself felt. The slight air of resentment which arose when he had said that he should refer for his authority to the Bible subsided, and he went on.