I demurred at once. “I don’t know one rule of parliamentary law from another,” I said.
“We will have the best parliamentarian on the continent right by you all the time,” they said.
“I can’t see to recognize a man on the floor of the convention,” I said.
“We’ll have a dozen men at hand to tell you,” they replied. So it was arranged, and thus at the last moment I was chosen.
I had barely time to write the required keynote speech, but not enough to commit it to memory; nor sight to read it, even had I been willing to adopt that mode of delivery. It would not do to trust to extemporization. A friend, Col. J. Stoddard Johnston, who was familiar with my penmanship, came to the rescue. Concealing my manuscript behind his hat he lined the words out to me between the cheering, I having mastered a few opening sentences.
Luck was with me. It went with a bang—not, however, wholly without detection. The Indianans, devoted to Hendricks, were very wroth.
“See that fat man behind the hat telling him what to say,” said one to his neighbor, who answered, “Yes, and wrote it for him, too, I’ll be bound!”
One might as well attempt to drive six horses by proxy as preside over a national convention by hearsay. I lost my parliamentarian at once. I just made my parliamentary law as we went. Never before or since did any deliberate body proceed under manual so startling and original. But I delivered each ruling with a resonance—it were better called an impudence—which had an air of authority. There was a good deal of quiet laughter on the floor among the knowing ones, though I knew the mass was as ignorant as I was myself; but realizing that I meant to be just and was expediting business the convention soon warmed to me, and feeling this I began to be perfectly at home. I never had a better day’s sport in all my life.
One incident was particularly amusing. Much against my will and over my protest I was brought to promise that Miss Phoebe Couzins, who bore a Woman’s Rights Memorial, should at some opportune moment be given the floor to present it. I foresaw what a row it was bound to occasion.
Toward noon, when there was a lull in the proceedings, I said with an emphasis meant to carry conviction: “Gentlemen of the convention, Miss Phoebe Couzins, a representative of the Woman’s Association of America, has a memorial from that body, and in the absence of other business the chair will now recognize her.”