standing that I was to be free
to talk about my life-work and the needs of my people. I also had it
understood that I was not to speak in the capacity of a professional
lecturer, or for mere commercial gain.

In my efforts on the public platform I never have been able to
understand why people come to hear me speak. This question I never can
rid myself of. Time and time again, as I have stood in the street in
front of a building and have seen men and women passing in large numbers
into the audience room where I was to speak, I have felt ashamed that
I should be the cause of people--as it seemed to me--wasting a valuable
hour of their time. Some years ago I was to deliver an address before a
literary society in Madison, Wis. An hour before the time set for me
to speak, a fierce snow-storm began, and continued for several hours. I
made up my mind that there would be no audience, and that I should not
have to speak, but, as a matter of duty, I went to the church, and
found it packed with people. The surprise gave me a shock that I did not
recover from during the whole evening.

People often ask me if I feel nervous before speaking, or else they
suggest that, since I speak often, they suppose that I get used to it.
In answer to this question I have to say that I always suffer intensely
from nervousness before speaking. More than once, just before I was to
make an important address, this nervous strain has been so great that
I have resolved never again to speak in public. I not only feel nervous
before speaking, but after I have finished I usually feel a sense of
regret, because it seems to me as if I had left out of my address the
main thing and the best thing that I had meant to say.

There is a great compensation, though, for this preliminary nervous
suffering, that comes to me after I have been speaking for about ten
minutes, and have come to feel that I have really mastered my audience,
and that we have gotten into full and complete sympathy with each other.
It seems to me that there is rarely such a combination of mental and
physical delight in any effort as that which comes to a public speaker
when he feels that he has a great audience completely within his
control. There is a thread of sympathy and oneness that connects a
public speaker with his audience, that is just as strong as though it
was something tangible and visible. If in an audience of a thousand
people there is one person who is not in sympathy with my v