cago 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