The Art of Lecturing Part 7

There is no easier task in the world than to defeat the police authorities in a free speech fight. In the few cases where we lose it is our own fault. The police are usually acting under orders when making arrests and nothing is gained by making bitter enemies of them unless they treat you brutally.

A cool head, a disposition to reason the matter out with the district attorney, the chief of police, the mayor, or in the courts, without ever offering to compromise your speaking rights, will always triumph. The realization by the authorities that they are in a dirty and tyrannical business is one of your strongest weapons. Courtesy and persuasive but firm and unflinching reasoning makes them more conscious of their humiliating part in the matter. If you do or say foolish or offensive things they will forget their conscience in their anger, and give you a fight for which you alone are to blame.

There are a few exceptions to this rule; cases where the authorities are bent on victory; even then there is no excuse for losing your head. But you must give them all the fight they want and never under any circ.u.mstances show the white feather or accept anything less than all you need to make your meeting successful. In handling the police and their relations to street meetings the New York comrades have set other cities an example to go by. The comrades select any corners they please and during the day notify the police by telephone that Socialist meetings will be held that evening on such and such corners and a policeman is instructed to protect each meeting. The New York comrades have had many hard battles with the police to keep this system, and they have reason to be proud of the result.

The permit system is all right if it does not keep you from the corners you wish to use. If it does, the best thing is to fight it out for a new arrangement or the right to hold your meetings without arrangements. If you conduct your case properly the public will be overwhelmingly on your side. It is good at such times to "view with alarm" the introduction of Russian methods into "free" America. If there is real intelligence on the other side your opponents will soon conclude that you are getting more publicity for your ideas out of the police fight than you could ever get at peaceful street meetings. After this light has dawned you will proceed undisturbed.

BOOK-SELLING AND PROFESSIONALISM

A man who does a day's work in a shop and speaks on a street corner in the evening has about as much chance of becoming an effective speaker as he would have of becoming an effective musician, physician or lawyer by the same method. It is necessary, however, to train before going wholly into the work just as a man studies law evenings, before starting out as a lawyer.

In New York, Socialist street meetings are a force and count for a great deal, because the committee keeps a staff of capable speakers on salary to do nothing else. In Chicago street, speaking is a failure and many have concluded we should be better without it. This is because Chicago lacks the enterprise to follow the example of New York and depends on voluntary, haphazard, untrained, inefficient speaking.

New York, I believe, spends a good deal of money on its street meetings, and for some reason Chicago does not seem to be able to do that. But this barrier is not insurmountable. Street meetings with efficient speakers may be made self-supporting, but professional speakers are the only ones who have any chance to become efficient to the point of making their meetings pay a salary and other expenses.

I hardly think it can be done by collections but I know by experience that it can be done by book-selling.

I worked several weeks in New York one summer at the highest rate they pay and instead of sending a bill for wages I sent a paper dollar which represented the surplus from book sales after I had paid myself all that was due to me, and no collections were taken. My best book-sale at one meeting was $34 but it would just as easily have gone over $40 if the supply had held out. $20 to $30 worth of literature can be sold easily enough on any one of half a dozen corners in New York.

Chicago is not as good as New York but it is at least half as good and a good speaker could work for $25 a week and make three or four meetings foot the bill. I did this very easily in Chicago last summer. The beginner should sell 10c booklets or pamphlets, and elsewhere in this volume he will find two speeches that will show him how to do it. At a street meeting he need not make these speeches in detail, but just give the pith of them.

After a while 25c books may be sold, and with practice and hard study 50c books will sell readily. This question is more fully dealt with in the next chapter.

About two different books may be sold effectively at the meeting; one early in the meeting and the other about the close. The closing book talk however, should be begun while the meeting is at its full strength.

One street meeting that puts ten to twenty dollars worth of good books into circulation is worth a dozen where the only result is the remembrance of what the speaker said.

CHAPTER XX

BOOK-SELLING AT MEETINGS

The tones of the speaker's voice fade away and are forever lost. Too often the ideas which the voice proclaimed drift into the background and presently disappear. This is the crowning limitation of public speaking.

The lecturer should be, first of all, an educator, and his work should not be "writ in water." The lazy lecturer who imagines that his duties to his audience end with his peroration is unfaithful to his great calling. Lazy lecturers are not very numerous as they are certain of a career curtailed from lack of an audience.

There are some lecturers, however, who see nothing of importance in their work except the delivering of their lectures. And the educational value of such workers is only a fraction of what it might be. Life is not so long for the strongest of us, nor are the results that can be achieved by the most gifted such that we can afford to waste the best of our opportunities. This article is not intended as a sermon, but if as lecturers we are to be educators we must not neglect to use the greatest weapons against ignorance in the educational armory--books.

The books here referred to are not the volumes in the lecturer's own library. They, of course, are indispensable. There have been men who felt destined to be lecturers without the use of mere "book learning,"

but they never lived long enough to find out why the public did not take them at their own estimate.

The man who undertakes to deal with a subject without first reading, and as far as possible, mastering, the best books on that subject, would no more be a lecturer than a man who tried to cut a field of wheat with a pocket-knife would be a farmer.

Any good lecture of an hour and a quarter has meant ten to fifty hours'

hard reading. There is much in the reading that cannot possibly appear in the lecture. Another lecture on a related theme or one widely different, has probably suggested itself. I remember while rummaging in history to find proofs and ill.u.s.trations of "The Materialistic Conception of History," which conception I was to defend presently in a public debate, gathering the scheme of a course of four lectures on the significance of the great voyages of the middle ages--a course which proved very successful when delivered about a month later.

Again, the reading furnishes a great deal of material on the question of the lecture itself which cannot be put into it for sheer lack of time.

This is why a lecture always educates the lecturer much more than it does the hearer. The hearer therefore labors under two great disadvantages. First, he forgets much that he hears, and, second, there is so much that he does not hear at all.

The first handicap can be removed by the printing of the lectures. The second is not so easily disposed of.

A lecturer may state in three minutes an idea which has cost many days'

reading. The idea has great importance to the speaker and, if he is a master of his art, he will impress its importance on his hearers. That is what his art is for. But that idea will never illume the hearer's brain as the lecturer's until the hearer knows as does the lecturer what there is back of it.

There is only one way in which this can be done--the hearer must have access to the same sources of knowledge as the lecturer. This does not necessarily mean that every hearer should have a lecturer's library. It does mean, however, that there are some books which should be read by both.

The lecturer himself is the best judge as to which books belong to this category. In number they range anywhere from a dozen up, according to the ambitions of the reader.

My method of dealing with this problem has been to take one book at a time, tell the audience about it and see that the ushers were ready to supply all demands. In this way I have sold more than two whole editions of Boelsche's book "The Evolution of Man." In one week speaking in half a dozen different cities I sold an entire edition of my first book "Evolution, Social and Organic." One Sunday morning this spring at the Garrick meeting at the close of a five-minute talk about Paul Lafargue's "Social and Philosophic Studies" the audience, in three minutes, bought 250 copies, and more than a hundred would-be purchasers had to wait until the following Sunday for a new supply. A few Sundays later Blatchford's "G.o.d and My Neighbor," a dollar volume, had a sale of 204 copies--the total book sale for that morning reaching what I believe is the record for a Socialist meeting--$220.00. The last lecture of this season (April, 1910,) had a book sale of $190.00, which included 380 paper back copies of Sinclair's "Prince Hagen."

These figures are given to show that this work can be done, and if it is not done the lecturer alone is to blame. Anyone who can lecture at all can do this with some measure of success. There can be no sane doubt of its value. About 500 young men in the Garrick audience have built up small but fine libraries of their own through this advice given in this way, and there is no part of my work which gives me so great satisfaction.

I never allow my audience to imagine for a moment that my book talk is a mere matter of selling something. There will always be one or two in the audience who will take that view--natural selection always overlooks a few chuckle-heads.

Now let us tabulate some of the results that may be obtained in this way:

(1) By getting these books into the hands of our hearers we give our teachings from the platform a greater permanence in their minds. We not only help them to knowledge, but put them in the way of helping themselves directly. This alone is, justification enough, but it is not all.

(2) We encourage the publication of just those books which in our estimation contain the principles which we regard as destined to promote the happiness of mankind.

(3) The difference between the wholesale and retail prices is often enough to make successful a lecture course which would have otherwise died prematurely of bankruptcy. Where a meeting cannot live on the collection, the book sales may mean financial salvation. The morning we sold $220 of books at the Garrick we also took a collection of $80.

Without the book sales $80 would have been the total receipts, and this collection was normal. Yet the Garrick meetings cost $140 each. After we had paid the publisher's bill we had a balance from book sales of $120, which made the total receipts not $80 but $200. And this is among the least important results of book selling.

Everything, of course, depends on the book talk. I will now give sample book talks which any speaker may commit to memory and use, probably with results that will be a surprise and an encouragement.

CHAPTER XXI

EXAMPLE BOOK TALKS

We are by this time agreed that the sale of the proper books at lecture meetings is greatly to be desired. In this article we shall consider the chief instrument by which this is attained--the book talk.

We might treat this theme by laying down general rules as to the elements which enter into the make-up of a successful book talk, but while this is necessary it is not enough--so many speakers seem to find it very difficult to apply rules. This part of the question will be treated in a few sentences.

A book talk, to be successful, must answer the following questions:

(1) Who wrote the book? It is not, of course, simply a question as to the author's name, but his position and his competence to write on the subject, etc.

(2) What object had the author in view?

(3) What is the main thesis of the book?

(4) Why is it necessary that the hearer should read the book?