THE POPULAR LECTURE.

The popular lecture, in the Northern States of America, has become, in

Yankee parlance, "an institution"; and it has attained such prevalence

and power that it deserves more attention and more respect from those

who assume the control of the motive influences of society than it has

hitherto received. It has been the habit of certain literary men, (more

particularly of such as do not possess a gift for public speech,) and of

certain literary magazines, (managed by persons of delicate habit and

weak lungs,) to regard and to treat the popular lecture with a measure

of contempt. For the last fifteen years the downfall of what has been

popularly denominated "The Lecture System" has been confidently

predicted by those who, granting them the wisdom which they assume,

should have been so well acquainted with its nature and its adaptation

to a permanent popular want as to see that it must live and thrive until

something more practicable can be contrived to take its place. If

anything more interesting, cheaper, simpler, or more portable can be

found than a vigorous man, with a pleasant manner, good voice, and

something to say, then the popular lecture will certainly be superseded;

but the man who will invent this substitute is at present engaged on a

new order of architecture and the problem of perpetual motion, with such

prospect of full employment for the present as will give "the lecture

system" sufficient time to die gracefully. An institution which can

maintain its foothold in the popular regard throughout such a war as has

challenged the interest and taxed the energies of this nation during the

last three years is one which will not easily die; and the history of

the popular lecture proves, that, wherever it has been once established,

it retains its place through all changes of social material and all

phases of political and religious influence. Circumstances there may be

which will bring intermissions in its yearly operations; but no instance

can be found of its permanent relinquishment by a community which has

once enjoyed its privileges, and acquired a taste for the food and

inspiration which it furnishes.

An exposition of the character of the popular lecture, the machinery by

which it is supported, and the results which it aims at and

accomplishes, cannot be without interest to thoughtful readers.

What is the popular lecture in America? It will not help us in this

inquest to refer to a dictionary; for it is not necessary that the

performance which Americans call a lecture should be an instructive

discourse at all. A lecture before the Young Men's Associations and

lecture organizations of the country is any characteristic utterance of

any man who speaks in their employment. The word "lecture" covers

generally generically all the orations, declamations, dissertations,

exhortations, recitations, humorous extravaganzas, narratives of travel,

harangues, sermons, semi-sermons, demi-semi-sermons, and lectures

proper, which can be crowded into what is called "a course," but which

might be more properly called a bundle, the bundle depending for its

size upon the depth of the managerial purse. Ten or twelve lectures are

the usual number, although in some of the larger cities, beginning early

in "the lecture season," and ending late, the number given may reach

twenty.

The machinery for the management and support of these lectures is as

simple as possible, the lecturers themselves having nothing to do with

it. There are library associations or lyceum associations, composed

principally of young men, in all the cities and large villages, which

institute and manage courses of lectures every winter, for the double

purpose of interesting and instructing the public and replenishing their

treasury. The latter object, it must be confessed, occupies the

principal place, although, as it depends for its attainment on the

success of the former, the public is as well served as if its

entertainment were alone consulted. In the smaller towns there are

usually temporary associations, organized for the simple purpose of

obtaining lecturers and managing the business incident to a course. Not

unfrequently, ten, twenty, or thirty men pledge themselves to make up

any deficiency there may be in the funds required for the season's

entertainments, and place the management in the hands of a committee.

Sometimes two or three persons call themselves a lecture-committee, and

employ lecturers, themselves risking the possible loss, and dividing

among themselves any profits which their course may produce. The

opposition or independent courses in the larger cities are often

instituted by such organizations,--sometimes, indeed, by a single

person, who has a natural turn for this sort of enterprise. The

invitations to lecturers are usually sent out months in advance, though

very few courses are definitely provided for and arranged before the

first of November. The fees of lecturers range from fifty to a hundred

dollars. A few uniformly command the latter sum, and lecture-committees

find it for their interest to employ them. It is to be presumed that the

universal rise of prices will change these figures somewhat.

The popular lecture is the most purely democratic of all our democratic

institutions. The people hear a second time only those who interest

them. If a lecturer cannot engage the interest of his audience, his fame

or greatness or learning will pass for nothing. A lecture-audience will

forgive extravagance, but never dulness. They will give a man one chance

to interest them, and if he fails, that is the last of him. The

lecture-committees understand this, and gauge the public taste or the

public humor as delicately as the most accomplished theatrical manager.

The man who receives their invitation may generally be certain that the

public wish either to see or hear him. Popularity is the test. Only

popularity after trial, or notoriety before, can draw houses. Only

popularity and notoriety can pay expenses and swell the balance of

profit. Notoriety in the various walks of life and the personal

influence of friends and admirers can usually secure a single hearing,

but no outside influence can keep a lecturer permanently in the field.

If the people "love to hear" him, he can lecture from Maine to

California six months in the year; if not, he cannot get so much as a

second invitation.

One of the noticeable features of the public humor in this matter is the

aversion to professional lecturers,--to those who make lecturing a

business, with no higher aim than that of getting a living. No calling

or profession can possibly be more legitimate than that of the lecturer;

there is nothing immodest or otherwise improper in the advertisement of

a man's literary wares; yet it is true, beyond dispute, that the public

do not regard with favor those who make lecturing their business,

particularly if they present themselves uninvited. So well is this

understood by this class of lecturers that a part of their machinery

consists of invitations numerously signed, which invitations are written

and circulated by themselves, their interested friends, or their

authorized agents, and published as their apology for appearing. A man

who has no other place in the world than that which he makes for himself

on the platform is never a popular favorite, unless he uses the platform

for the advocacy of some great philanthropic movement or reform, into

which he throws unselfishly the leading efforts of his life. Referring

to the history of the last twenty years, it will readily be seen that

those who have undertaken to make lecturing a business, without side

pursuit or superior aim, are either retired from the field or are very

low in the public favor. The public insist, that, in order to be an

acceptable lecturer, a man must be something else, that he must begin

and remain something else; and it will be found to-day that those only

who work worthily in other fields have a permanent hold upon the

affections of lecture-going people. It is the public judgment or caprice

that the work of the lecturer shall be incidental to some worthy

pursuit, from which that work temporarily calls him. There seems to be a

kind of coquetry in this. The public do not accept of those who are too

openly in the market or who are too easily won. They prefer to entice a

man from his chosen love, and account his favors sweeter because the

wedded favorite is deprived of them.

A lecturer's first invitation, in consonance with these facts, is almost

always suggested by his excellence or notoriety in some department of

life that may or may not be allied to the platform. If a man makes a

remarkable speech, he is very naturally invited to lecture; but he is no

more certain to be invited than he who wins a battle. A showman gets his

first invitation for the same reason that an author does,--because he is

notorious. Nearly all new men in the lecture-field are introduced

through the popular desire to see notorious or famous people. A man

whose name is on the popular tongue is a man whom the popular eye

desires to see. Such a man will always draw one audience; and a single

occasion is all that he is engaged for. After getting a place upon the

platform, it is for him to prove his power to hold it. If he does not

lecture as well as he writes, or fights, or walks, or lifts, or leaps,

or hunts lions, or manages an exhibition, or plays a French horn, or

does anything which has made him a desirable man for curious people to

see, then he makes way for the next notoriety. Very few courses of

lectures are delivered in the cities and larger villages that do not

present at least one new man, who is invited simply because people are

curious to see him. The popular desire is strong to come in some way

into personal contact with those who do remarkable things. They cannot

be chased in the street; they can be seen only to a limited extent in

the drawing-room; but it is easy to pay twenty-five cents to hear them

lecture, with the privilege of looking at them for an hour and

criticizing them for a week.

It is a noteworthy fact, in this connection, that, while there are

thousands of cultivated men who would esteem it a privilege to lecture

for the lecturer's usual fee, there are hardly more than twenty-five in

the country whom the public considers it a privilege worth paying for to

hear. It is astonishing, that, in a country so fertile as this in the

production of gifted and cultivated men, so few find it possible to

establish themselves upon the platform as popular favorites. If the

accepted ones were in a number of obvious particulars alike, there could

be some intelligent generalizing upon the subject; but men possessing

fewer points of resemblance, or presenting stronger contrasts, in style

of person and performance, than the established favorites of

lecture-going people, cannot be found in the world; and if any

generalization be attempted, it must relate to matters below the surface

and beyond the common apprehension. It is certain that not always the

greatest or the most brilliant or the most accomplished men are to be

found among the popular lecturers. A man may make a great, even a

brilliant speech on an important public question, and be utterly dreary

in the lecture-room. There are multitudes of eloquent clergymen who in

their pulpits command the attention of immense congregations, yet who

meet with no acknowledgment of power upon the platform.

In a survey of those who are the established favorites, it will be found

that there are no slaves among them. The people will not accept those

who are creed-bound, or those who bow to any authority but God and

themselves. They insist that those who address them shall be absolutely

free, and that they shall speak only for themselves. Party and sectarian

spokesmen find no permanent place upon the platform. It is only when a

lecturer cuts loose from all his conventional belongings, and speaks

with thought and tongue unfettered, that he finds his way to the popular

heart. This freedom has sometimes been considered dangerous by the more

conservative members of society; and they have not unfrequently managed

to get the lectures into their own hands, or to organize courses

representing more moderate views in matters of society, politics, and

religion; but their efforts have uniformly proved failures. The people

have always refused to support lectures which brought before them the

bondmen of creeds and parties. Year after year men have been invited to

address audiences three fourths of whom disagreed utterly with the

sentiments and opinions which it was well understood such men would

present, simply because they were free men, with minds of their own and

tongues that would speak those minds or be dumb. Names could be

mentioned of those who for the last fifteen years have been established

favorites in communities which listened to them respectfully, nay,

applauded them warmly, and then abused them for the remainder of the

year.

It is not enough, however, that a lecturer be free. He must have

something fresh to say, or a fresh and attractive way of saying that

which is not altogether new. Individuality, and a certain personal

quality which, for lack of a better name, is called magnetism, are also

essential to the popular lecturer. People desire to be moved, to be

acted upon by a strong and positive nature. They like to be furnished

with fresh ideas, or with old ideas put into a fresh and practical form,

so that they can be readily apprehended and appropriated.

And here comes the grand difficulty which every lecturer encounters, and

over which so many stumble into failure,--that of interesting and

refreshing men and women of education and culture, and, at the same

time, of pleasing, moving, and instructing those of feebler acquirements

or no acquirements at all. Most men of fine powers fail before a popular

audience, because they do not fully apprehend the thing to be done. They

almost invariably write above the level of one half of their audience,

and below the level of the other half. In either event, they fail, and

have the mortification of seeing others of inferior gifts succeed

through a nicer adaptation of their literary wares to the wants of the

market. Much depends upon the choice of a subject. If that be selected

from those which touch universal interests and address common motives,

half the work is done. A clear, simple, direct style of composition, apt

illustration, (and the power of this is marvellous,) and a distinct and

pleasant delivery, will do much to complete the success.

It is about equally painful and amusing to witness the efforts which

some men make to write down to the supposed capacity of a popular

audience. The puerilities and buffooneries that are sometimes undertaken

by these men, for the purpose of conciliating the crowd, certainly amuse

the crowd, and so answer their end, though not in a way to bring

reputation to the actors. No greater mistake can possibly be made than

that of regarding an American lecture-going audience with contempt.

There is no literary tribunal in this country that can more readily and

justly decide whether a man has anything to say, and can say it well,

than a lecture-audience in one of the smaller cities and larger

villages of the Northern States. It is quite common to suppose that a

Western audience demands a lower grade of literary effort, and a rougher

style of speech, than an Eastern audience. Indeed, there are those who

suppose that a lecture which would fully meet the demands of an average

Eastern audience would be beyond the comprehension of an average Western

audience; but the lecturer who shall accept any such assumption as this

will find himself very unpleasantly mistaken. At the West, the lecture

is both popular and fashionable, and the best people attend it. A

lecturer may always be certain, then, that the best he can do will be

thoroughly appreciated. The West is not particularly tolerant of dull

men; but if a man be alive, he will find a market there for the best

thought he produces.

In the larger cities of the East, the opera, the play, the frequent

concert, the exhibition, the club-house, the social assembly, and a

variety of public gatherings and public excitements, take from the

lecture-audiences the class that furnishes the best material in the

smaller cities; so that a lecturer rarely or never sees his best

audiences in New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia.

Another requisite to popularity upon the platform is earnestness. Those

who imagine that a permanent hold upon the people can be obtained by

amusing them are widely mistaken. The popular lecture has fallen into

disrepute with many worthy persons in consequence of the admission of

buffoons and triflers to the lecturer's platform; and it is an evil

which ought to be remedied. It is an evil, indeed, which is slowly

working its own remedy. It is a disgraceful fact, that, in order to draw

together crowds of people, men have been admitted to the platform whose

notoriety was won by the grossest of literary charlatanism,--men whose

only hold upon the public was gained by extravagances of thought and

expression which would compromise the dignity and destroy the

self-respect of any man of character and common sense. It is not enough

that these persons quickly disgust their audiences, and have a brief

life upon the list. They ought never to be introduced to the public as

lecturers; and any momentary augmentation of receipts that may be

secured from the rabble by the patronage of such mountebanks is more

than lost by the disgrace they bring and the damage they do to what is

called "The Lecture System." It is an insult to any lyceum-audience to

suppose that it can have a strong and permanent interest in a trifler;

and it is a gross injustice to every respectable lecturer in the field

to introduce into his guild men who have no better motive and no higher

mission than the stage-clown and the negro-minstrel.

But the career of triflers is always short. Only he who feels that he

has something to do in making the world wiser and better, and who, in a

bold and manly way, tries persistently to do it, is always welcome; and

this fact--an incontrovertible one--is a sufficient vindication of the

popular lecture from all the aspersions that have been cast upon it by

disappointed aspirants for its honors, and shallow observers of its

tendencies and results.

The choice of a subject has already been spoken of as a matter of

importance, and a word should be said touching its manner of treatment.

This introduces a discussion of the kind of lecture which at the present

time is mainly in demand. Many wise and good men have questioned the

character of the popular lecture. In their view, it does not add

sufficiently to the stock of popular knowledge. The results are not

solid and tangible. They would prefer scientific, or historical, or

philosophical discourses. This conviction is so strong with these men,

and the men themselves are so much respected, that the people are

inclined to coincide with them in the matter of theory, while at the

same time they refuse to give their theory practical entertainment. One

reason why scientific and historical lectures are not popular is to be

found in the difficulty of obtaining lecturers who have sufficient

ingenuity and enthusiasm to make such lectures interesting. The number

of men in the United States who can make such lectures attractive to

popular audiences can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. We

have had but one universally popular lecturer on astronomy in twenty

years, and he is now numbered among the precious sacrifices of the war.

There is only one entirely acceptable popular lecturer on the natural

sciences in New England; and what is he among so many?

But this class of lectures has not been widely successful, even under

the most favorable circumstances, and with the very best lecturers; and

it is to be observed, that they grow less successful with the increasing

intelligence of the people. In this fact is to be found an entirely

rational and competent explanation of their failure. The schools have

done so much toward popularizing science, and the circulating-library

has rendered so familiar the prominent facts of history, that men and

women do not go to the lecture to learn, and, as far as any appreciably

practical benefit is concerned, do not need to go. It is only when some

eminent enthusiast in these walks of learning consents to address them

that they come out, and then it is rather to place themselves under the

influence of his personality than to acquire the knowledge which he

dispenses. Facts, if they are identified in any special way with the

experience and life of the lecturer, are always acceptable; but facts

which are recorded in books find a poor market in the popular

lecture-room. Thus, while purely historical and scientific lectures are

entirely neglected, narratives of personal travel, which, combine much

of historical and scientific interest, have been quite popular, and,

indeed, have been the specialties of more than one of the most popular

of American lecturers, whose names will be suggested at once by this

statement.

Twenty years ago the first popular lectures on anatomy and physiology

were given, and a corps of lecturers came up and swept over the whole

country, with much of interest and instruction to the people and no

small profit to themselves. These lectures called the attention of

educators to these sciences. Text-books for schools and colleges were

prepared, and anatomy and physiology became common studies for the

young. In various ways, through school-books and magazines and

newspapers, there has accumulated a stock of popular knowledge of these

sciences, and an apprehension of the limit of their practical

usefulness, which have quite destroyed the demand for lectures upon

them. Though a new generation has risen since the lecture on anatomy and

physiology was the rage, no leaner field could possibly be found than

that which the country now presents to the popular lecturer on these

sciences. These facts are interesting in themselves, and they serve to

illustrate the truth of that which has been stated touching lectures

upon general historical and scientific subjects.

For facts alone the modern American public does not go hungry. American

life is crowded with facts, to which the newspaper gives daily record

and diffusion. Ideas, motives, thoughts, these are always in demand. Men

wish for nothing more than to know how to classify their facts, what to

do with them, how to govern them, and how far to be governed by them;

and the man who takes the facts with which the popular life has come

into contact and association, and draws from them their nutritive and

motive power, and points out their relations to individual and universal

good, and organizes around them the popular thought, and uses them to

give direction to the popular life, and does all this with masterly

skill, is the man whose houses are never large enough to contain those

who throng to hear him. This is the popular lecturer, _par excellence_.

The people have an earnest desire to know what a strong, independent,

free man has to say about those facts which touch the experience, the

direction, and the duty of their daily life; and the lecturer who with

a hearty human sympathy addresses himself to this desire, and enters

upon the service with genuine enthusiasm, wins the highest reward there

is to be won in his field of effort.

The more ill-natured critics of the popular lecturer have reflected with

ridicule upon his habit of repetition, A lecturer in full employment

will deliver the same discourse perhaps fifty or a hundred times in a

single season. There are probably half a dozen favorite lectures which

have been delivered from two hundred to five hundred times within the

last fifteen years. It does, indeed, at first glance, seem ridiculous

for a man to stand, night after night, and deliver the same words, with

the original enthusiasm apparently at its full height; and some

lecturers, with an extra spice of mirthfulness in their composition,

have given public record of their impressions in this respect. There

are, however, certain facts to be considered which at least relieve him

from the charge of literary sterility. A lecture often becomes famous,

and is demanded by each succeeding audience, whatever the lecturer's

preferences may be. There are lectures called for every year by

audiences and committees which the lecturer would be glad never to see

again, and which he never would see again, if he were to consult his own

judgment alone. Then the popular lecturer, as has been already

intimated, is usually engaged during two thirds of the year in some

business or profession whose duties forbid the worthy preparation of

more than one discourse for winter use. Then, if he has numerous

engagements, he has neither time nor strength to do more than his

nightly work; for, among all the pursuits in which literary men engage,

none is more exhaustive in its demands upon the nervous energy than that

of constant lecturing. The fulfilment of from seventy-five to ninety

engagements involves, in round numbers, ten thousand miles of

railroad-travel, much of it in the night, and all of it during the most

unpleasant season of the year. There is probably nothing short of a

military campaign that is attended by so many discomforts and genuine

hardships as a season of active lecturing. Unless a man be young and

endowed with an extraordinary amount of vital power, he becomes entirely

unfitted by his nightly work, and the dissipation consequent upon

constant change of scene, for consecutive thought and elaborate

composition.

It is fortunate for the lecturer that there is no necessity for variety.

The oft-repeated lecture is new to each new audience, and, being

thoroughly in hand, and entirely familiar, is delivered with better

effect than if the speaker were frequently choosing from a

well-furnished repertory. It is popularly supposed that a lecturer loses

all interest in a performance which he repeats so many times. This

supposition is correct, in certain aspects of the matter, but not in any

sense which detracts from his power to make it interesting to others. It

is the general experience of lecturers, that, until they have delivered

a discourse from ten to twenty times, they are themselves unable to

measure its power; so that a performance which is offered at first

timidly and with many doubts comes at length to be delivered

confidently, and with measurable certainty of acceptance and success.

The grand interest of a lecturer is in his new audience, in his

experiment on an assembly of fresh minds. The lecture itself is regarded

only as an instrument by which a desirable and important result is to be

achieved; and familiarity with it, and steady use in its elocutionary

handling, are conditions of the best success. Having selected the

subject which, at the time, and for the times, he considers freshest and

most fruitful, and with thorough care written out all he has to say upon

it, there is no call for recurrence to minor themes, either as regards

the credit of the lecturer or the best interests of those whom he

addresses.

What good has the popular lecture accomplished? Its most enthusiastic

advocates will not assert that it has added greatly to the stock of

popular knowledge, in science or art, in history, philosophy, or

literature; yet the most modest of them may claim that it has bestowed

upon American society a permanent good of incalculable value. The

relentless foe of all bigotry in politics and religion, the constant

opponent of every form of bondage to party and sect, the practical

teacher of the broadest toleration of individual opinion, it has had

more to do with the steady melioration of the prejudices growing out of

denominational interests in Church and State than any other agency

whatever. The platform of the lecture-hall has been common ground for

the representatives of all our social, political, and religious

organizations. It is there that orthodox and heterodox, progressive and

conservative, have won respect for themselves and toleration for their

opinions by the demonstration of their own manhood, and the recognition

of the common human brotherhood; for one has only to prove himself a

true man, and to show a universal sympathy with men, to secure popular

toleration for any opinion he may hold. Hardly a decade has passed away

since, in nearly every Northern State, men suffered social depreciation

in consequence of their political and religious opinions. Party and

sectarian names have been freely used as reproachful and even as

disgraceful epithets. To call a man by the name which he had chosen as

the representative of his political or religious opinions was considered

equivalent to calling him a knave or a fool; and if it happened that he

was in the minority, his name alone was regarded as the stamp of social

degradation. Now, thanks to the influence of the popular lecture mainly,

men have made, and are rapidly making, room for each other. A man may be

in the minority now without consequently being in personal disgrace. Men

of liberal and even latitudinarian views are generously received in

orthodox communities, and those of orthodox faith are gladly welcomed by

men who subscribe to a shorter creed and bear a broader charter of life

and liberty. There certainly has never been a time in the history of

America when there was such generous and general toleration of all men

and all opinions as now; and as the popular lecture has been universal,

with a determined aim and a manifest influence toward this end, it is

but fair to claim for it a prominent agency in the result.

Another good which may be counted among the fruits of the popular

lecture is the education of the public taste in intellectual amusements.

The end which the lecture-goer seeks is not always improvement, in any

respect. Multitudes of men and women have attended the lecture to be

interested, and to be interested intellectually is to be intellectually

amused. Lecturers who have appealed simply to the emotional nature,

without attempting to engage the intellect, have ceased to be popular

favorites. So far as the popular lecture has taken hold of the

affections of a community, and secured its constant support, it has

destroyed the desire for all amusements of a lower grade; and it will be

found, that, generally, those who attend the lecture rarely or never

give their patronage and presence to the buffooneries of the day. They

have found something better,--something with more of flavor in the

eating, with more of nutriment in the digestion. How great a good this

is those only can judge who realize that men will have amusements of

some sort, and that, if they cannot obtain such as will elevate them,

they will indulge in such as are frivolous and dissipating. The lecture

does quite as much for elevated amusement out of the hall as in it. The

quickening social influence of an excellent lecture, particularly in a

community where life flows sluggishly and all are absorbed in manual

labor, is as remarkable as it is beneficent. The lecture and the

lecturer are the common topics of discussion for a week, and the

conversation which is so apt to cling to health and the weather is

raised above the level of commonplace.

Notwithstanding the fact that a moiety, or a majority, of the popular

lecturers are clergymen, the lecture has not always received the favor

of the cloth. Indeed, there has often been private and sometimes public

complaint on the part of preachers, that the finished productions of the

lecturer, the results of long and patient elaboration, rendered doubly

attractive by a style of delivery to be won only by frequent repetition

of the same discourse, have brought the hastily prepared and plainly

presented Sunday sermon into an unjust and damaging comparison. The

complaint is a strange one, particularly as no one has ever claimed that

the highest style of eloquence or the most remarkable models of rhetoric

are to be found in the lecture-hall. There has, at least, been no

general conviction that a standard of excellence in English and its

utterance has been maintained there too high for the comfort and credit

of the pulpit. It is possible, therefore, that the pulpit betrays its

weak point, and needs the comparison which it deprecates. A man of

brains will gratefully receive suggestions from any quarter. That

impulses to a more familiar and direct style of sermonizing, a brighter

and better elocution, and a bolder utterance of personal convictions,

have come to the pulpit from the platform, there is no question. This

feeling on the part of preachers is by no means universal, however; for

some of them have long regarded the lecture with contempt, and have

sometimes resented it as an impertinence. And it may be (for there shall

be no quarrel in the matter) that lecturers are quacks, and that

lectures, like homoeopathic remedies, are very contemptible things; but

they have pleasantly modified the doses of the old practice, however

slow the doctors are to confess it; and so much, at least, may be

counted among the beneficent results of the system under discussion.

Last in the brief enumeration of the benefits of the popular lecture, it

has been the devoted, consistent, never tiring champion of universal

liberty. If the popular lecturer has not been a power in this nation for

the overthrow of American Slavery,--for its overthrow in the

conscientious convictions and the legal and conventional fastnesses of

the nation,--then have the friends of oppression grossly lied; for none

have received their malicious and angry objurgations more unsparingly

than our plain-speaking gentleman who makes his yearly circuit among the

lyceums. No champion of slavery, no advocate of privilege, no apologist

for systematized and legalized wrong has ever been able to establish

himself as a popular lecturer. The people may listen respectfully to

such a man once; but, having heard him, they drop him forever. In truth,

a man cannot be a popular lecturer who does not plant himself upon the

eternal principles of justice. He must be a democrat, a believer in and

an advocate of the equal rights of men. A slavery-loving,

slavery-upholding lecturer would be just as much of an anomaly as a

slavery-loving and slavery-singing poet. The taint so vitiates the whole

æsthetic nature, so poisons the moral sense, so palsies the finer

powers, so destroys all true sympathy with universal humanity, that the

composition of an acceptable lecture becomes impossible to the man who

bears it. The popular lecture, as it has been described in this article,

has never existed at the South, and could not be tolerated there. Until

within three years it has never found opportunity for utterance in the

capital of the nation; but where liberty goes, it makes its way, and

helps to break the way for liberty everywhere.

It is a noteworthy fact, that the popular lecturer, though the devoted

advocate of freedom to the slave, has rarely been regarded as either a

trustworthy or an important man in the party which has represented his

principles in this country. He has always been too free to be a

partisan, too radical and intractable for a party seeking power or

striving to preserve it. No party of any considerable magnitude has ever

regarded him as its expositor. A thousand times have party-speakers and

party-organs, professing principles identical with his own, washed their

hands of all responsibility for his utterances. Even now, when the

sound of falling shackles is in the air, and the smoke of the torment of

the oppressor fills the sky, old partisans of freedom cannot quite

forget their stupid and hackneyed animosities, but still bemoan the

baleful influence of this fiery itinerant. Representative of none but

himself, disowned or hated by all parties, acknowledging responsibility

to God and his own conscience only, he has done his work, and done it

well,--done it amid careful questionings and careless curses,--done it,

and been royally paid for it, when speakers who fairly represented the

political and religious prejudices of the people could not have called

around them a baker's dozen, with tickets at half-price or at no price

at all.

When the cloud which now envelops the country shall gather up its

sulphurous folds and roll away, tinted in its retiring by the smile of

God beaming from a calm sky upon a nation redeemed to freedom and

justice, and the historian, in the light of that smile, shall trace home

to their fountains the streams of influence and power which will then

join to form the river of the national life, he will find one, starting

far inland among the mountains, longer than the rest and mightier than

most, and will recognize it as the confluent outpouring of living,

Christian speech, from ten thousand lecture-platforms, on which free men

stood and vindicated the right of man to freedom.