I feel I cannot do better than close this chapter with an account of an audience I once addressed in the Scotland Road, Liverpool, whither I was sent by the Corporation Lectures Committee, who had engaged me to give a series of free lectures in the city. I was accompanied by my friend and host, Mr. Charles Birchall, who thus generously gave up his valuable evening to keep me company, for he had heard the lecture before. We got a bit of a shock on arriving at the fine hall, when we saw the class of people that were going in, and my good friend took the first opportunity afforded him in the anteroom of putting his watch, chain and money in a place of safety before taking his seat.

On the stroke of eight I mounted the platform, and faced an audience of I should say 1200, but such a congregation as I have never addressed before, and hope never to again. It was evident at once that most of them had come in there for shelter out of the bleak and bitter night, for they were nearly all in rags or at any rate very poorly clad. And they smelt. Poor things, they looked wolfish from hunger, scarred with brutality, and desperate with want. And I was to lecture to them upon Romance and Reality at Sea! My mind was made up in an instant. A lecture in any ordinary acceptation of the term would have been not only a farce, but a dire insult to these hapless people, and so I drew upon my great stock of reminiscences of Liverpool Docks when I was young, of the realities of sea-life, of things, in short, that they could understand and appreciate. I don’t know whether I made them forget my evening dress, I forgot it myself, I know, but it is certain that I held them from the start, and was rewarded at the close of the lecture, which lasted nearly two hours, with vociferous applause.

When I rejoined my friend he was almost speechless with amazement. Knowing Liverpool so much better than I did, he had wondered mightily what I could find to say to an audience like that, obviously hungry, wretchedly clad, and vicious-looking. And then he had seen them interested, and applauding heartily, forgetting their own very present troubles in my recital of what they felt to be truly my own sad experiences as an unwanted waif of the street, lurking about the docks of that great city. I have since heard that some of my successors did not fare so well as I did, and I am not at all surprised at that, I should be more inclined to wonder if it were not so, when I recall the antecedents and careers of the most of them.

In all my experience I never met with a really unjust or unkind audience but once, and that was in a large town of Scotland. Through some carelessness on the part of those in charge of the proceedings the galleries had been allowed to become the playground of a number of noisy, thoughtless children, who amused themselves during my lecture by running about and jumping over the benches, accompanying their antics by shrill cries. I stopped and protested, suggesting either that the youngsters should be kept quiet or removed. To my utter surprise my remarks were received with hisses. I promptly thanked the audience and retired, saying that since they preferred rather to listen to the racket overhead than what I had to say, that I had much pleasure in leaving them to that enjoyment.

CHAPTER XV
AUSTRALASIA

After my visit to the United States on lecturing business, I gladly embraced the opportunity to go to Australasia on a similar errand, although, in the latter case, the venture was entirely my own. I mean that I was not engaged by anyone. More than that. I had an agent whose agreement with me was that he should have a free hand in spending money on my behalf, but that of the net proceeds he should take two-fifths, leaving the remaining three-fifths to me. My only safeguard was that we should have weekly settlements, but as that was treated as non-existent, it didn’t make any difference, and I had the pleasant knowledge that all through my tour I was working to maintain three people. That, however, is a mere detail.

As was to be expected, my audiences in Australasia were very much smaller than they had been in America, but I gladly note that what they lacked in numbers they made up in appreciation. Perhaps this was to be expected, as I found that I was well and favourably known by repute in the Antipodes, which was certainly not the case in America. And besides the handicap of my being an Englishman was absent. This, however, is not the pleasantest of my recollections of that tour. At the time of my visit the total contributions of the whole of Australasia towards the expense of the British Navy was only £240,000 a year, or much less than the cost of a scout. One of my lectures (“The Way they have in the Navy”) was an attempt to show my hearers what the British Navy really was, and in it I spared no pains to convince my Southern hearers that their attitude towards the Navy was not only ridiculously penurious, but fraught with the greatest danger to themselves. I very well remember impressing upon them, whenever I got the opportunity, that the amount contributed by the British people for the Navy was about £1 per head, and that if the Australasian people would only tax themselves to the same extent they would in five years have such a Navy as would afford them the protection of which they were now destitute. Nor could they reasonably expect the British Navy, if the mother-country was in danger, to spare a single modern warship for the protection of the Antipodes, all of whose cities lay near the coast, and liable to destruction by a single foreign war vessel of modern design and armament.

What the Australasian Dominions have done since then is a matter of common knowledge; if not quite as much as I recommended, still gigantic strides have been made, and I am grateful to feel that what I had the opportunity of saying by tongue and pen aided local effort sufficiently to bring about such a desirable result. At the time of my visit the obsolete cruiser Powerful was the most up-to-date vessel in Australasian waters, and the flagship of the Admiral, Sir Wilmot Hawkes. Then there came into Sydney the Japanese training squadron, three small gunboats, each of which mounted a twelve-inch gun, and though about one-quarter of the size of the Powerful, with armament sufficient to have sunk a whole fleet of Powerfuls at her leisure.

The object-lesson could not have been better timed, and I hope I used it for all it was worth. I know, at any rate, that I was severely censured for plain speaking, but I felt and said that the welfare of such cities as Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide was far before any personal considerations. But I proved then that both Press and people only wanted the facts pointed out to them for them to act. They were not content simply to turn over in their sleep and mutter, “Oh, it will last our time.” Not they. And the recent naval activity of the Southern Dominions is the result.

Apart from this patriotic matter, the reception that I met with everywhere was most encouraging. It is true that I often had the misfortune in the smaller towns of coming immediately after or before a theatrical company, which had either swept up all the “joy-money,” or it, the cash, was awaiting the advent of the fun-makers. Also I had to compete with the cinematograph in the large cities, which had just arrived, and was scooping up all the money in sight. And beyond that I was surely unfortunate in my time. Just after my arrival in Auckland from Sydney, and on the very day that I was to give the first of four lectures in Her Majesty’s Theatre, came the upheaving news of Mr. R. J. Seddons’ death, which affected the whole community more than an earthquake would have done. But not in the same way that it affected me.