The first speaker of the evening was a woman who well deserved the cheers which greeted her appearance. Her address on Workmen’s Compensation was so clear, so aptly put, so well reasoned through and so within the limit of time assigned her, that when she finished, the enthusiastic Herr Director shouted: “Bravo! bravo!” loud enough to be heard above the less euphonious sound of hand clapping, in which form of applause the American audience indulges.
The address was an eloquent but unemotional plea for fair play for the working man, an arraignment of present practices, cruelly sickening in detail, and frightful as a revelation of the attitude of large industrial interests towards labor. It showed the fair-mindedness of the men there, that they listened so approvingly, in spite of the fact that a large number of them was in similar relationship to labor, and that the proposed law for which she pleaded would be against their own interests.
After the lady’s address, the Glee Club sang and then the United States Senator was introduced. I have forgotten his subject, but that does not matter, for it had no relation to what he said. It was the kind of address which could be delivered with equal propriety at a Grangers’ picnic or a political meeting.
There were two things which the senator did not know: First, that his audience had outgrown that particular kind of address, and second, when to stop. When his final finally was finally spoken, the Glee Club sang again, after which the Herr Director was called upon to speak. He was listened to most attentively as he told how German cities are built, governed, provisioned and lighted.
There were at least four speeches beside my own, and it was long past midnight when the Glee Club sang its last glee, and the club adjourned to meet again the next month, when it would receive other more or less distinguished guests, eat a six course dinner and listen to half a dozen speakers, each one of them eager to right the wrongs of this universe.
When the Herr Director had said good-bye to the hundred or more people who told him how much they enjoyed his address, he retired in a most happy mood. I found him chuckling as he untied his cravat.
“It was lovely, perfectly lovely,” he said; “but what children they are.”
“Yes,” I replied, “they are children; and, like children, are eager to learn.”
XI
The American Spirit Among the Mormons
BOTH the Herr Director and his wife had a strange desire to see the Mormons. They explained it by saying that besides the Indians whom they had as yet not seen, and the Negroes whom they had seen everywhere, they always thought of the Mormons as most American, that is most unlike other people.