views. So the question is how to make use of our opportunities, broaden our field of usefulness and make ourselves felt?

I wish that you would all be thinking up answers and that you will presently give this convention the benefit of your thoughts. It has been hinted by other members from this floor that "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings."

Perhaps it is true that one way to make ourselves felt is to do better work. To be more earnest in our longings to help the cause of truth and righteousness by our work. To help people to get more out of this present life and of the life to come, for only eternity can measure the effect of any one life, however humble, upon the world. As Browning so wonderfully illsu.rates in his "Pippa Passes": "Nor knowest thou what argument thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent."

Sometimes helping people to laugh is the very best help that we can give them. Sometimes they are ready for a great thought, let there be some such in the literature you are presenting. We know that some people go to hear a reader simply to be amused. They want to laugh and not to think. One woman told me that she would not allow herself to listen to anything that would make her think. She went to a reading as she took an opiate, to relieve pain and to help her to forget. Consequently she said that she wanted only "farce comedy." It is pitiful that one should be in such a condition, but if she is, surely a literary opiate is a better one than the kind procured over a drug counter. Farce comedy would not prove so soothing to all of us, but we must remember that this individual may be in our audience as well as the one who wants to think. Can we not manage to please and to help them both? If we have no appreciation of a subject or a story ourselves, we surely can not make an audience appreciate the theme.

I have a much-loved friend who specializes on Browning. She wished to add something lighter to her repertoire. I suggested Frank R. Stockton's "The Casting Away of Mrs. Lex and Mrs. Ayleshine," over which so many people have laughed. My Browning friend read it through but said she found no place for even a smile and she wondered how any one ever found it amusing. She was wise enough not to try to make the public laugh

over something that had no humor in it for her. I fear we are not all so wisely honest. We decide to read "Joan of Arc" because Maude Adams has recently made a great hit with her beautiful and spectacular presentation of it upon the Harvard stadium, or because it is a new and much talked of book; or we know the author and he promises us exclusive rights; or we think to add to the impressiveness of our advance circulars to have printed thereon a Browning, a Shakespeare, an Isben, or whatever program. Any one of these reasons is all right, if there be the added reason that the program you are to give contains a message to your own heart that you desire to and feel that you can worthily present to an audience. Some messages are universal. As the one contained in the "Golden Rule" it appeals to all mankind as does the Bible statement "and there abideth Faith, Hope, Love, and the greatest of these is Love." Any enlargement or illustration of these universal truths must make its appeal.

There may be a thread of humor or the glisten of many tears woven into the story, but back of it all is the great message "Do unto others as you would that they should do to you and "the greatest of these is Love." This is the foundation upon which Victor Hugo has builded the greatest masterpiece of fiction, "Les Miserables," hence its wonderful appeal. But this particular enlargement of a universal truth may not appeal to you. If it does not, do not persuade yourself that you can make it appeal to an audience. In order to intelligently receive the message ourselves many of us, if not all of us, need to broaden our general education. We know that some begin to specialize on elocution before they have sufficient ground. work of general information. We are "blind leaders of the blind" and both fall into the ditch, or we are blindly trying to lead those who see more clearly than we do and they throw us into the ditch and go on without us and do not invite us to play return engagements. It scarcely seems that any intelligent person would attempt to interpret to an audience a passage containing even one word that he does not understand but I have known some exceptionally gifted people to do this. To refer once more to my friend, the Browning reader. She once said to me in discussing one of Browning's lines in which he uses words to this effect (I do not think I can quote exactly): “If the young David had divided his cheeses with Goliath he no

doubt would have found that they had something in common." Now, said my friend, I wonder what Browning meant by cheeses? His complete meaning doubtless was that if we should stop to break bread with our greatest enemy before going out to fight with him, we would doubtless find that we had something in common. But why didn't Browning say bread instead of cheese? He must have had a specific reason for using the word cheeses. I do not know what that reason was, but I think the word cheeses should be emphasized since it is such an unusual substitution of cheeses for bread."

It happened that I was familiar with that particular chapter so I said, "I think Browning's only reason for using the word 'cheeses' is that cheeses were the best thing that David had with him to divide. His father had sent him to the valley of Elah where Israel and the Philistines were fighting and had said to him: "Carry these ten cheeses to the captain of their thousand and look how thy brethren fare and take their pledge." The explanation was so simple, the answer so easy after you heard it, that we had the laugh together she had missed over "The Casting Away of Mrs. Lex and Mrs. Ayleshine." Browning took it for granted that his readers were familiar with the Bible and hence would find no obscurity in the word cheeses.

Are we all, as public readers and teachers, as familiar with the Bible as we should be? Whether we believe ir its divine inspiration or not, it behooves us as readers and teachers to spend more time upon the study of the book that stands at the head of all literature. In it we find all phases of life and character from the Christ who "gave His life a ransom for many" to the Judas that betrayed Him. I believe that there is a greater demand for Bible readers than for readers along any other line on the Lyceum platform today. If you can bring home the messages of the Bible to the Lyceum public, you need never lack for engagements. But if the Bible form of the message does not appeal to you, do not deliver that form; you cannot do it worthily. You may have found a Bible message in a comedy; if so, give the comedy by all means. The Bible itself tells us that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine." To my mind the fool in King Lear is one of Shakespeare's noblest characters, seeking to cheer the old king and help him to forget the impending tragedy.

Find a worthy message somewhere and give it with your whole soul. This I believe will broaden our field of usefulness and help us to make ourselves felt-felt for good to all eternity. "Nor knowest thou what argument thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent."

As Mr. Hawn is not able to be with us tomorrow morning, I have asked him to occupy the hour this morning with his talk on The Relation of the Lyceum Public to Us," and I am very happy to introduce Mr. Hawn this morning.

MR. HENRY GAINES HAWN:

Ladies and Gentlemen: I am a little bit tired, not of hearing myself (I never tire of that), but of being called upon to assume the attitude of fault-finder. The topics usually assigned me deal in some way with the attitude of the public towards our profession. Believing it my duty to obey the orders of Madam Chairman, I accept the task she allots me, with the privilege of slightly changing the text. That is, I prefer to enlarge upon the relation of the Educational and general public towards us rather than the smaller, and to my mind, less important public described by the word Lyceum.

I cannot be true to myself without taking for perhaps the hundredth time the distasteful role of what we call in slang parlance, a "knocker." You must all admit that I am at least consistent in playing this part, for I have been saying ungracious things before these conventions for many years past, and shall probably continue to say them until I am completely convinced as to the injustice and unwisdom of my many complainings, or until the "knocking" has had some effect. I am glad to report that in my narrow circle there is some effect.

My preachment, in one word, is in Shakespeare's phrase, read to us so delightfully last evening, ""Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus;" which elucidated, means simply that whatever appraisement is given us by the public at large, is a just one and, good or bad, is our desert.

The opinion of this old world is well worth considering. I take off my hat to that opinion. I want its good opinion; I dread its bad opinion, but, good or bad, this appraisement in the long run is always right. If a new voice is heard in Israel crying in the wilderness, and no heed is paid to it for some few years, you may say that the

populace is wrong, the prophet is right, as will be verified in the days to come. So in the case of a man or a woman stepping to the fore and doing anything; if the world is discouraging at first, that is of no moment, but, if after a decade, if after twenty-five years or more, the world insists upon having none of it, spewing it from its mouth, the world is emphatically justified. Time is the test.

Now, therefore, I want to cry from the housetops that the present discouragement which you are experiencing, and which must be noted, which must not be glozed over, is to be accounted for by some fault within ourselves. It is, therefore, my purpose to touch those faults this morning not gently, but with the same loving care that a surgeon would an open wound. First, let us look at the evidences of some of our short-comings, and enumerate some of our faults. For eighteen years past we have had men of business speak to us, as at our opening session, yesterday. They invariably enlarge upon the importance of articulation and enunciation, as if these infantile elements of human speech were the sum and substance of our work. Even in our colleges and schools we are now dubbing this work "Public Speaking," "Debate," "Oratory," etc., seemingly ourselves blinded to our real worth and place in education. We, as specialists, assemble annually, and yet the manifestations of our work are frequently confined to reading papers, with eyes glued to them, in a perfunctory manner, lacking charm, force, directness. Here we clearly show a great lack of the accomplishment of extempore speech, freedom of mind, voice and body, which we are supposed to inculcate in others. As to the artistic manifestations of our work, we seem to deal almost exclusively with the dramatic form of interpretation.

Now, the consequence is, that the educators of the land find almost no place for our work upon their curricula. They tell you frankly they don't want it; and I, an outsider for a moment, and putting myself in the place of the father of a child, would say I do not want it. As for platform interpretation, there is no man in the country who can read a play "at" me. If any man in the town of Asbury Park today could choose between hearing the best "reader" in the land read, in his own person, some great drama, and seeing some ordinary stock company's performance, having the ad