or he will lose his crowd, and the better his crowd the
sooner he will lose it. If he is talking to "bums" they will stay
whether he talks or not, but if he has an audience of people who have
other things awaiting their attention they will pass on the moment the
speaker loses his grip.

This is why telling stories at street meetings is not so good a thing as
some unobserving speakers suppose. No matter how good a story is, it has
a tendency to break up a crowd. I noticed it often before I caught the
reason. A story always carries its own conclusion and it thereby makes a
sort of a breaking off place in a speech like the end of a chapter in a
book. At the end of a good story the audience will laugh and take a
moments rest. For about a minute your spell is broken and men whom you
might of held the rest of the evening remember during that minute that
they have stayed too long already. Of course this does not apply to a
story of two or three sentences thrust into the middle of an argument
without breaking or closing it. Longer stories may be used to advantage
but they are not very useful to a speaker who has much to say and knows
how to say it. Of course wit is a valuable factor but wit shows itself
in a lightning dart, not in a long story.

The street speaker should use short sentences of simple words. He should
avoid oratory and talk as if he were telling something to another man
and in dead earnest about it. I have watched a man talk to another man
on the street forgetting the outside world completely and using forceful
language and eloquent gestures. If such a man could only talk like that
to an audience he would be surprised at his own success. Put him before
an audience and his natural manner disappears, he shuffles his feet,
does not know what to do with his hands, and brings forth a voice nobody
ever heard him use before.

DISTURBERS

As to people who disturb your meeting, if you are speaking in hobo-dom
you may well despair. There are so many drunks, that interruptions are
constant and irrepressible, and every interruption breaks your grip on
the audience. Moral: Don't speak there.

On a corner where you get an audience of typical working men
disturbances are rare and in a majority of cases if they are not easily
suppressed it is lack of tact on the part of the speaker. A speaker
should never try to be smart at the expense of a man in the audience,
even when he speaks out of his turn. A courteous explanation