k back on that first lecturing tour as a time of
the sowing of good seed, the harvest of which is now beginning to
ripen. I had no advance agents to announce my arrival, and at one town
in the north I found nobody at the station to meet me. I spent the most
miserable two and a half hours of my life waiting Micawber-like for
something to turn up; and it turned up in the person of the village
blacksmith. I spoke to him, and explained my mission to the town. He
had heard nothing of any meeting. Incidentally I discovered that my
correspondent was in Adelaide, and had evidently forgotten all about my
coming. "Well," I said to the blacksmith, "if you can get together a
dozen intelligent men I will explain effective voting to them." He
looked at me with a dumbfounded air, and then burst out, "Good G--,
madam, there are not three intelligent men in the town." But the old
order has changed, and in 1909 Mrs. Young addressed an enthusiastic
audience of 150 in the same town and on the same subject. The town,
moreover, is in a Parliamentary district, in which every candidate at
the recent general election--and there were seven of them--supported
effective voting. Far down in the south I went to a little village
containing seven churches, which accounted (said the local doctor) for
the extreme backwardness of its inhabitants. "They have so many church
affairs to attend to that there is no time to think of anything else."
At the close of this lecturing tour The Register undertook the public
count through its columns, which did so much to bring the reform before
the people of South Australia. Public interest was well aroused on the
matter before my long projected trip to America took shape. "Come and
teach us how to vote," my American friends had been writing to me for
years; but I felt that it was a big order for a little woman of 68 to
undertake the conversion to electoral reform of 60 millions of the most
conceited people in the world. Still I went. I left Adelaide bound for
America on April 4, 1893, as a Government Commissioner and delegate to
the Great World's Fair Congresses in Chicago.

In Melbourne and Sydney on my way to the boat for San Francisco I found
work to do. Melbourne was in the throes of the great financial panic,
when bank after bank closed its doors; but the people went to church as
usual. I preached in the Unitarian Church on the Sunday, and lectured
in Dr. Strong's Australian Church on Monday. In Sydney Miss Rose