6. Make your talk personal and apply every point to the wants, woes and sentiments of your listeners.
7. Never regret the half hour or the hour occupied by the music, recitations, drama, or other entertainment preceding your speech.
8. Do not manifest impatience at the time consumed in short talks by local speakers.
9. Remember that generally all the good that it is possible for you to accomplish if your audience by preliminary exercises is brought into rapport and sympathy with you, can be accomplished in half an hour. If you can get the complete attention of your audience for half an hour, they will have sufficient matter to fully occupy their thoughts the rest of the day and night, and not only this, if your talk is interesting and they go away hungry instead of satiated, they will gladly attend the next meeting.
10. Be satisfied if you interest your hearers and be not greedy to instruct. For those really interested by oratory will instruct themselves by means of literature which is the only source of real instruction. Oratory should win sentiment and stir interest; literature performs the work of education. The speech fulfils its mission if it persuades men to read aright.
ENTERTAINMENT.
A meeting that is half entertainment or if illustrations, anecdotes and stories be included under the head of entertainment, a meeting that is nine-tenths entertainment and one-tenth direct statement of fact and reasoning therefrom, is of far more value than a three hours' bombardment with facts, figures, arguments and the soundest reasoning, directed by a master. The average human mind, as God made it and as our present unsocial life has unmade it, will become wearied by such an effort and leave the meeting with the firm resolve not to attend another. Such meetings cannot be held often and do not win the sympathies and co-operation of men nearly so much as a meeting planned and arranged on the basis of adaptation to the capacities of the average listener and his multiform emotions and mental wants. This is the secret of the success of the popular churches. They do not try to teach the people too much. They do not strain that organ, very weak in the average human mind, known as the logical faculty.
Far more progress can be made in any community by instituting a successful series of meetings, wherein serious reasoning occupies a minor portion of the time, the rest filled in by entertainment, than can be gained by meetings that furnish a perfect mine of wealth in the way of food for thought and intellectual feasting for the few who have the power to appreciate such things.[4]
LIFE IS SHORT.
The length of the man's speech should be measured, not by his own physical endurance nor the time that his breath lasts, not by the amount that he has to say nor even by the capacity of his audience to listen or to remain in the room, but in every case it should be measured by the capacity of his hearers to enjoy.