making discoveries in the domain of science, modern
Socialism gets its point of departure from Utopianism, and without those
advances would have been impossible.

Here is a new and glorious world from which the working class has been
carefully shut out. Here we find armor that cannot be dented and weapons
whose points cannot be turned aside in the struggle of the Proletariat
for its own emancipation.

Any lecturer who will acquaint himself with the names of Lamarck,
Darwin, Lyell, Lavoisier, Huxley, Haeckel, Virchow, Tyndall, Fiske,
Wallace, Romanes, Helmholtz, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Weismann, etc., in
science, and Marx, Engels, Lafargue, Labriola, Ferri, Vandervelde,
Kautsky, Morgan, Ward, Dietzgen, etc., in sociology, and learn what
those names stand for, such a lecturer, other things being equal, has a
great and useful field before him.

It was well enough in the middle ages for great conclaves of clericals
to discuss sagely what language will be spoken in heaven, and how many
angels could dance a saraband on the point of a needle, but the
twentieth century is face to face with tremendous problems and the
public mind clamors for a solution. It will listen eagerly to the man
who knows and has something to say. But it insists that the man who
knows no more than it knows itself, shall hold his peace.

This is why the Socialist and the Scientist are the only men who command
real audiences--they are the only men with great and vital truths to
proclaim.

CHAPTER IX

LEARN TO STOP

The platform has no greater nuisance than that interminable bore--the
speaker who cannot stop. Of all platform vices this is about the worst.
The speaker who acquires a reputation for it becomes a terror instead of
an attraction to an audience.

As a rule there is no audience when his name is the only item on the
card; he gets his chance speaking with some one else whom the listeners
have really come to hear. And this is just when his performance is least
desirable. Either he gets in before the real attraction and taxes
everybody's patience, or he follows and addresses his remarks to
retreating shoulders.

I met a man recently who had made quite a name in his own town as a
speaker, and his townsmen visiting other cities proudly declared him a
coming Bebel. I took the first opportunity to hear him. He had a good
voice and was a ready speaker, but I soon found he carried a burden that
more than balanced all his merits--he simply co