I should be slow to mention the latter, but alas! my own experience so conclusively proves it, and the peculiarity of human nature, in or out of our movement is, that it is wonderfully human.
There are very few of us who do not enjoy sitting in plain view of a large audience and, when any good purpose is to be served, it is a very laudable ambition.
But if we have no better end to gain than standing between a speaker and his audience and, though with the best intentions in the world, adding to the difficulties of a task that is already greater than most of us would care to face, for the sake of our great cause, and that it may be the more ably defended, let us refrain.
CHAPTER XIII
COURSE LECTURING—LEARN TO CLASSIFY
The definition of science as “knowledge classified,” while leaving much to be said, is perhaps, as satisfactory as any that could be condensed into two words.
A trained capacity for classification is wholly indispensable in a course lecturer. We all know the speaker who announces his subject and then rambles off all over the universe. With this speaker, everybody knows that, no matter what the subject or the occasion of the meeting, it is going to be the same old talk that has done duty, how long nobody can remember.
If, under the head of “surplus value” you talk twenty minutes about prohibition, how will you avoid repetition when you come to speak on the temperance question?
The surest way to acquire this qualification is to study the sciences. The dazzling array of facts which science has accumulated, owe half their value to the systematization they have received at the hands of her greatest savants.
It is impossible to take a step in scientific study without coming face to face with her grand classifications. At the very beginning science divides the universe into two parts, the inorganic and the organic. The inorganic is studied under the head of “physics”; the organic, under “biology.”