Reuben started by saying that there was something even more important than the question of the new building, and that was the question of what the club itself meant. In its inception, the idea of creating machinery for municipal improvement had been foremost. Certainly he and those associated with him in projecting the original meeting had taken that view of their work. That meeting had contented itself with an indefinite expression of good intentions, but still had not dissented from the idea that the club was to mean something and to do something. Now it became necessary, before final steps were taken, to ask what that something was to be. So far as he gathered, much thought had been given as to the probable receipts and expenditure, as to where the card-room, the billiard-room, the lunch-room, and so forth should be located, and as to the adoption of all modern facilities for making themselves comfortable in their new club-house. But about the original objects of the club he had not heard a syllable. To him this attitude was profoundly unsatisfactory. At the present moment, the village was laboring under a heavy load of trouble and anxiety. Nearly if not quite a thousand families were painfully affected by the abrupt stoppage of the two largest works in the section. If actual want was not already experienced, at least the vivid threat of it hung over their poorer neighbors all about them. This fact, it seemed to him, must appeal to them all much more than any conceivable suggestion about furnishing a place in which they might sit about at their ease in leisure hours. He put it to the citizens before him, that their way was made exceptionally clear for them by this calamity which had overtaken their village. If the club meant anything, it must mean an organization to help these poor people who were suddenly, through no fault of their own, deprived of incomes and employment. That was something vital, pressing, urgent; easy-chairs and billiard-tables could wait, but the unemployed artisans of Thessaly and their families could not. This in substance was what Reuben said; and when he had finished there succeeded a curious instant of dead silence, and then a loud confusion of comment. Half a dozen men were on their feet now, among them both Tenney and John Fairchild. The hardware merchant spoke first, and what he said was not so prudent as those who knew him best might have expected. The novel excitement of speaking in public got into his head, and he not only used language like a more illiterate man than he really was, but he attacked Tracy personally for striving to foment trouble between capital and labor, and thereby created an unfavorable impression upon the minds of his listeners.